tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-60280732019-01-23T09:00:03.000+00:00An Spailpín FánachBehave yourself, you spailp&#237;n f&#225;nach!An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comBlogger1056125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-6208154129028813192019-01-23T09:00:00.000+00:002019-01-23T09:00:02.992+00:00Members of the Oireachtas Have Nothing to Feel Smug About<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kV3BTbM3Wyk/XEeH1OIqSTI/AAAAAAAAD2s/B6s2cPyAqgYyMopa9gZQWrukhC7T6f77wCLcBGAs/s1600/dail_centenary.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="600" height="213" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kV3BTbM3Wyk/XEeH1OIqSTI/AAAAAAAAD2s/B6s2cPyAqgYyMopa9gZQWrukhC7T6f77wCLcBGAs/s320/dail_centenary.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><i>It was around about the same time that UK prime minister Theresa May was in front of a baying House of Common. The contrast between this respectful celebration of 100 years of unbroken parliamentary democracy here </i>[sic]<i> and the shambles in London was not lost on the Dublin audience.</i><br /><div style="text-align: right;"><i><a href="https://www.blogger.com/goog_1873746957">Irish Times, Tue, Jan 22, 2019.</a></i></div><span id="goog_1873746959"></span><i></i><a href="https://www.blogger.com/"></a><br />It is the nature of the politician to be blessed with an above-average amount of self-regard. An adamantine hide is necessary in a life where you submit yourself to public judgement at least once every five years. However; the notion of the current members of the Oireachtas stiffening with pride at the thought that they are the finest of parliamentarians, not like those knuckle-dragging Tans across the way, is too much for even the most ravenous of goats to stomach.<br /><br />One hundred years after the first sitting of Dáil Éireann, Ireland is a state where the Gardaí have merrily ignored 7,900 crimes, some of them very serious, over the past seven years. Nobody knows why these crimes have been ignored, but the GRA, the Garda Representative Association, has made it quite clear that however it happened it wasn't their boys' fault. It may turn out that dog ate each and every one of their notebooks. It’s what Mr S Holmes used to refer to as a three-pipe problem.<br /><br />This is the same police force who were discovered to have made up breathalyser tests, bullied whistleblowers out of the force and saw the last two Garda Commissioners and the last two Ministers for Justice resign under never-really-fully-explained circumstances. The police exist to enforce the law; what does the law currently mean to the police? It seems to them as a midge on a summer’s evening on the mountain; bothersome, but not really to be taken seriously.<br /><br />The situation is so worrying a man could end up in hospital as a result. Except that were he foolish enough to do so he might be better of going straight to the graveyard with his wooden overcoat on, such is the state of the Health Service.<br /><br />The current Minister for Health is - nominally, theoretically - in charge of a Health Service that is unable to diagnose cervical cancer and over-estimates the price of the new children's hospital by one billion Euro, and counting. That's not the price of the thing, remember; that's how much the original estimate differs from the current estimate, and it's gone up, rather than down.<br /><br />How much is a billion Euro? It's enough to buy every single residential house in the town of Ballina, with about half of those in Castlebar thrown in as well. It's a lot of money, and yet the current Minister for Health, famously "mad as hell" about the cervical crisis, seems completely content to sign off on this bill, no matter how many more billions it goes up to. Don't forget either that this new hospital will not deliver one extra bed compared to the number of children’s beds currently available. Details!<br /><br />One wonders what the Minister for Finance, Paschal Donohoe, thinks of all this. Paschal is one of the leading politicians in the country. He had enough nous to know that, as he himself could never become leader, his allying himself closely with Leo Varadkar once Varadkar made his run would make him the next-best thing. When appointed Minister for Finance, the cognoscenti thought of those many media performances where he smothered criticism of Fine Gael in the manner of a conscientious huntsman drowning surplus beagles, and thought: here is the man to keep an iron grip on the public finances.<br /><br />If only. The <a href="https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2018/1127/1013787-budget-fiscal-advisory-council/">Irish Fiscal Advisory Council responded to last year's budget</a> by accusing the government of repeating the mistakes of the past - over-heating an already-overheated economy, thus guaranteeing that the country will be once again on its uppers when the tide goes out again, as it inevitably must.<br /><br />There is an irony in this as the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council was set specifically to perform this very task. One of the reasons identified for the crash of 2008 was that a "support the green jersey" policy blinded officials to their duty of telling the economic truth as it is, rather than as people wanted it to be. Thus when things went <i>splat!!</i>, there was no rainy-day money at all. Not behind the couch, not under the bed, not buried in the garden in a biscuit tin.<br /><br />And now, ten years later, we're doing it all again. The ambulance drivers struck yesterday. A nurses' strike is guaranteed. The teachers can't be far away from having the Art class studying Placarding 101. There's that monstrous, growing bill for the Children's Hospital collapsing into the weight of its own gravity like a fiscal black hole, set to swallow every single thing around it. And that's not even counting the six hundred million lids that the Health department was over budget last year, and for which money was found from .. well. We never do find out where this miracle money comes from, do we?<br /><br />And how does the political class respond to these triplicate impending disasters, to say nothing of Brexit itself, homelessness, the narrow tax base, the flight from rural Ireland? By poncing about the Mansion House telling each other how well they would have done at Soloheadbeg or Kilmichael had Fate not decided they would be born too late, and then off to Buswells, Kehoe's, Doheny's and sundry other houses to pint the night away.<br /><br />Brexit is a nightmare, but at least the British can see that there's a dirty big iceberg off the starboard bow and it could sink the whole ship. The first our politicians - and we the people, God help us, because it is us, after all, who are the ones who elect the donkeys in the first place – the first any of us will know about the iceberg is when we're clinging to a spar in the freezing Atlantic, watching the state go under once more, and asking ourselves: how the **** did that happen? It's a mystery alright, Paddy. Who could ever have seen that coming?An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-17180903318749599192018-12-17T09:00:00.000+00:002018-12-17T09:00:06.400+00:00The Year in Sports<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uHIV7iKnzcw/XBbC7V4DS0I/AAAAAAAAD2U/-EREyzjijT4SC3xU1JvKekDAZMFRvFC_wCLcBGAs/s1600/dublin_james_mccarthy.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="If you want it, you'll have to fight for it." border="0" data-original-height="815" data-original-width="1433" height="113" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uHIV7iKnzcw/XBbC7V4DS0I/AAAAAAAAD2U/-EREyzjijT4SC3xU1JvKekDAZMFRvFC_wCLcBGAs/s200/dublin_james_mccarthy.png" title="If you want it, you'll have to fight for it." width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>If you want it, you'll have to fight for it.</i></td></tr></tbody></table>Your bookmaker will return you fifty cent profit on every Euro you bet on Dublin if Dublin win five All-Ireland Football Championships in a row next year, something no county has achieved in football or hurling. How astonishing. And of course, the price is very hard to argue with. It is impossible to make a cogent case for any other county winning it, as each of the contenders has profound flaws and, while Dublin are by no means perfect, they are considerably better equipped to win than any other county.<br /><br />For all that, your correspondent can’t get it out of his head that Dublin won’t do it. The pressure and hype will be bananas, as more and more entities see the chance of a quick buck and climb up onto an already-overloaded Dub bandwagon. Even though the new rules are for the league only, who knows what tiny cracks the League will reveal that could be torn open in the white heat of Championship. But most of all, the biggest struggle that Dublin will face to win five-in-a-row is the struggle all dynasties face – the fact that players get old.<br /><br />This runs against conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom is that Dublin have found the alchemist’s stone, and can regenerate players like no-one else has been able to before. Brian Fenton and Con O’Callaghan are cited as proof, the replacements that are better than what went before.<br /><br />And that’s all fine, but there are more constants over the four-in-a-row starting fifteen than you might think. Cluxton, obviously. But also Jonny Cooper, Philly McMahon, Cian O’Sullivan and James McCarthy. That’s a lot of backs, keeping a lot of pressure off Cluxton, who cares little for pressure. It will not be the shock of shocks if Dublin do win five-in-a-row, of course. But it won’t be as big a shock as some think if they don’t. After all, Kilkenny were meant to be able replenish their players at ease too, but when Jackie Tyrell and Tommy Walsh and Henry Shefflin went off into the sunset, things began to fall apart.<br /><br />Of course, the monstrosity that is the Super Eight section of the Championship will do all in its power to preserve the powerful against the threat of the weak. Would anyone have heard of Mullinalaghta if there had been Super Eights in the Leinster Club Championship, or even in the Longford Club Championship?<br /><br />The Super Eights is a further betrayal of all the Championship stands for and should stand for, a point made time and again in this place. In many ways, the highlight of the summer was the sight of empty seats in Croke Park for the Super Eights, something that so shocked the grubby moneymen who are behind the thing that changes have already been made. Hopefully, it’s too late and the thing will be sent back to whatever hell from whence it rose.<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ElE5Y75eozI/XBbC7C-6BCI/AAAAAAAAD2c/0674euUTdyQ13BrrctcpTfss88uyNdaWgCEwYBhgL/s1600/limerick_shane_dowling.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Shane Dowling. No better man." border="0" data-original-height="330" data-original-width="620" height="106" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ElE5Y75eozI/XBbC7C-6BCI/AAAAAAAAD2c/0674euUTdyQ13BrrctcpTfss88uyNdaWgCEwYBhgL/s200/limerick_shane_dowling.jpg" title="" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Shane Dowling. No better man.</i></td></tr></tbody></table>Your correspondent is generally loathe to comment on hurling as I know enough about it to know I know very little about it, actually. I do know that the people of Limerick continue to float on a blissful cloud in this horrid winter weather and more power to them. But whether it’s my innate conservatism or not, I can’t help but be suspect of the provincial round robins.<br /><br />Heresy, I know. For those in Munster and Leinster – and even for people from Galway, I believe – these round-robin games seem to have been an unending series of delights. But for someone at a remove, it was a struggle to keep up and figure out exactly who is ahead and who is behind.<br />But that’s what a great competition should do! is the response. Of course. But only up to a point. There has to be a narrative or else it’s all very hard to sort in your head. If every game is an epic then no game can be an epic.<br /><br />Someone remarked that Limerick’s win this year was actually the greatest win of all time as no other All-Ireland winner had to beat so many top-class teams to win the title. And that’s true, but it’s also true because no other teams had to – it used to be a knockout competition. Maybe, as time rolls on, we’ll get used to it. Maybe. But it’s very hard not to worry about hurling when people are spending a lot of money claiming to promote the game in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, when they don’t stir one princely finger to promote the game north of the M6 motorway. There is something here that doesn’t quite add up.<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HJ471rHCD_I/XBbC7fFhXxI/AAAAAAAAD2k/34WrTP11dV07dutFzPQkuSIyRDivwUi1ACEwYBhgL/s1600/ireland_jacob_stockdale.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Jacobus Rex" border="0" data-original-height="337" data-original-width="600" height="111" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HJ471rHCD_I/XBbC7fFhXxI/AAAAAAAAD2k/34WrTP11dV07dutFzPQkuSIyRDivwUi1ACEwYBhgL/s200/ireland_jacob_stockdale.jpg" title="" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Jacobus Rex</i></td></tr></tbody></table>This was the greatest year in Irish international rugby history. Ireland won the Grand Slam, they won a southern hemisphere tour, and they beat New Zealand. Joe Schmidt is the best coach in the world, and Ireland have some of the best players in the world.<br /><br />There are those who ask questions about friendlies and what will Ireland do in the World Cup. They don’t really want to know. Anyone who follows rugby knows the worth of what Ireland have achieved and anyone who doesn’t, probably doesn’t really want to in the first place, and is only looking for mischief.<br /><br />But as with football and hurling, dark clouds loom in the distance. The game is changing all the time. Professionalism is twenty years old now, and rugby is so different from what went before. Amateur rugby was a backs’ game of field position. Professional rugby is a forwards’ game of ball retention.<br /><br />The old order is under more and more strain because money wins every argument, and nothing that went before, as regards tradition or honour or how-we-do-things, can withstand money. Agustín Pichot, the former scrum-half for Argentina and now vice-chairman of World Rugby, has spoken of how the demands on players cannot be met in current circumstances, and he's right. Something's got to give, and some things already have.<br /><br />France was a rugby powerhouse once. Now, her clubs have strangled the life out of the national team. It may be Stockholm Syndrome, as no team found more ways to annually batter Ireland than the French did, but now they’re gone it feels like the game has lost something, and there is an empty space where those gallant prancing cocks used to be. It just doesn’t feel right.<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KYdy-Uq77AU/XBbC7z-mlMI/AAAAAAAAD2k/wsjKnmBo2kk2rFdTLnCdl8F1fuwcIk3LQCEwYBhgL/s1600/tyson_fury.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1200" height="133" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KYdy-Uq77AU/XBbC7z-mlMI/AAAAAAAAD2k/wsjKnmBo2kk2rFdTLnCdl8F1fuwcIk3LQCEwYBhgL/s200/tyson_fury.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div><i>The best man in Ireland, England,</i></div><div><i>Scotland and Wales?</i></div></td></tr></tbody></table>How wonderful it would be if Tyson Fury could save boxing. It is one of those things that is only obvious after it is pointed out that without a functional, competitive heavyweight division all other boxing divisions are somehow lessened. And now, thanks to this extraordinary man it may be saved.<br /><br />It's a long path and it’s a lot to ask of Fury, who has his own demons to fight outside of the ring, but sport needs boxing. For a sport so easily corruptible, it is one of the noblest of sports in its way. I hope it can be saved in these changing times, and look forward to the rematch between Deontay Wilder and Fury with no little anticipation.<br />An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-7811883494057409232018-10-15T09:00:00.000+01:002018-10-15T09:00:04.113+01:00On Pride in the Nation﻿<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tbyx_PbpMkw/W8OtP3sMKUI/AAAAAAAAD18/9A26s11QCbkLWColK5Gjut6GfpBNYEyMwCLcBGAs/s1600/presidentialDebate20181013.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="180" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tbyx_PbpMkw/W8OtP3sMKUI/AAAAAAAAD18/9A26s11QCbkLWColK5Gjut6GfpBNYEyMwCLcBGAs/s320/presidentialDebate20181013.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />The <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2018-10-13/ireland/for-the-first-time-in-my-life-i-am-proud-to-be-irish-nzgtfw5dq">Times Ireland</a> published a column on Saturday in which Caroline O'Donoghue declared that, for the first time in her life, she is proud to be Irish. Your correspondent is damned if he can see why.<br /> <br /><br />Right now the nation is blessed with a government that is looked down upon by other governments held together with baling twine, UHU glue and three rusty nails. The current government relies for its survival on Deputy Michael Lowry, TD, a deputy found guilty of incorrect tax returns this year and against whom a motion of censure was passed in 2011. Not what you'd call moral authority, as such.<br /><br />The reason the government had to go cap in hand to Deputy Lowry in the first place is because it found itself one member short when Deputy Denis Naughten jumped before he was pushed over a number of undeclared dinners he enjoyed with one David McCourt, who represents the only bidder left standing in the "competition" to win the licence to rollout the National Broadband Plan.<br /><br />Deputy Naughten received not-at-all common cross-party support for his principled decision to resign but, as Gavin Jennings pointed out on Morning Ireland on Friday, it is not at all clear why exactly Naughten had to go.<br /><br />On the face of it, Denis Naughten had to go because had lunch with someone involved in a bidding process over which Naughten himself had the final decision. But the fact Naughten had lunched at least once with Mr McCourt was already known to An Taoiseach and in the public domain. So what, then, is the dining tipping point? At what point does a Minister become compromised?<br /><br />Is she fine if she has two dinners, but damned after three? At what point in the third dinner does the bell toll? First bite? Last slug of brandy, last pull of the cigar? Or just at the point where the big pot of spuds is placed on the table, with the steam rising off them and everyone ready to reach in and grab?<br /><br />The answer is, of course, that there is no point. There are no standards in Irish politics. There are only circumstances.<br /><br />If the wind is behind you, you may do what you damn-well please. If it's not, you have to tread very carefully, for you will be as damned for permitting the building of the halting site as you will be for stopping it.<br /><br />You have to tread so carefully, in fact, that the best thing to do is to close the door of the Ministerial office, put the feet up and sleep peacefully until the next election and/or reshuffle, whichever comes first, and it's time for some other silly bastard juggle live hand grenades. At least you've got the pension sorted.<br /><br />The absence of standards in Irish public life is equally visible in the Presidential election. Firstly, in the quality of the candidates, which is of the póinín variety - that type of miserable potato more often thrown out to the chickens than offered to feed the family.<br /><br />It is secondly reflected in the media's inability to make head nor tail of the campaign, other than writing <a href="https://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints/columnists/alison-oconnor/questions-need-to-be-asked-of-journalists-love-in-with-michael-d-473327.html">thinky-thought pieces</a> beating the breast about the media's poor job in holding Michael D to the gas last time out, and promising to go harder this time - without actually going so far as to go harder, as such. All things considered, with prejudice to none.<br /><br />And speaking of the First Citizen, An tUachtarán has decried black media coverage of his Presidency - being a poet, "black media" is Michael D's own coinage of "fake news," the pet term of one of his fellow Presidents - at his campaign launch. At no stage are the white media ever so base as to list what these horrid rumour are, or even ask him directly to answer them. That wouldn't be cricket.<br /><br />However, when you spend as much time in the gutter as your correspondent, you get to hear a few things. Unless there is a rumour out there that has not come to the low haunts frequented by <i>Spailpíní Fhánacha</i>, Michael D has nothing to fear. It's not like he's done anything illegal or jeopardized the state. If the full story were to come out, it may not even cost him the election. If anything, it might even win him more votes.<br /><br />And that's because nobody knows what "proper" behaviour is in Irish politics, because nobody has ever seen it, or expects to.<br /><br />Ireland is not a democracy. It is a feudal system where chieftains gather to squabble over beads and trinkets to bring home to their own gullible followers, while making out like so many bandits themselves and laughing all the way to the bank. If this is the Ireland you're proud of you can have it. I myself am sick to my teeth of it, and I mourn all the blood it cost to build so base a state.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-91813598956844200652018-10-09T09:00:00.000+01:002018-10-09T09:00:07.598+01:00What is the Point in Watching the Budget?<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7DZncUFOzBk/W7vHKrnSM_I/AAAAAAAAD1o/4hONp5HSF1kOsp21eRtUByHtAMKRSb55wCLcBGAs/s1600/pascalodonaghuefinegaeltddublin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="213" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7DZncUFOzBk/W7vHKrnSM_I/AAAAAAAAD1o/4hONp5HSF1kOsp21eRtUByHtAMKRSb55wCLcBGAs/s320/pascalodonaghuefinegaeltddublin.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pascal O'Donoghue, TD, Minister for Finance</td></tr></tbody></table>Do you plan to watch the budget today, Reader? Will you listen to the Minister, thrill to the analysis, and carefully ponder the responses to the budget from the parties’ various spokespersons on finance when they, too, address Dáil Éireann?<br /><br />And are you entirely sure that’s wise? All things considered, would you not be better off beating yourself unconscious with a brick instead?<br /><br />You say that’s crazy talk. No, it’s not. Beating yourself unconscious with a brick is every bit as sensible as listening to the budget and expecting the government to exercise any control over the public finances – insofar as they government can figure out what the public finances are in the first place, of course.<br /><br />The one reason the country hasn’t sunk beneath the waves – and I thank almighty God for it – is that we must have our budgets signed off in Berlin anymore, even since that time we went crazy buying two-bed apartments with one parking space and thinking they were little goldmines. The majority of the spending is already spent before the Minister got out of bed this morning. What the Minister will actually be talking about is what he’s allowed to spend from the change discovered at the back of the couch, as the big money is only handled by the big boys any more.<br /><br />And even then, the unhappy man will still make a bags of it. His is an impossible task.<br /><br />Professor Séamus Coffey, head of the Fiscal Advisory Council, was interviewed on <a href="https://www.rte.ie/radio1/this-week/">This Week</a> on RTÉ Radio One on Sunday. Professor Coffey noted that every year for the past fifteen years the Department of Health has been unable to calculate its spending correctly.<br /><br />This is phenomenally bad practice, and what makes it worse is that every time the Department manages to underestimate spending. It’s not that the Department of Health gets its sums wrong, as such. It’s that it always gets them wrong in the same way.<br /><br />For fifteen years the Department has tried to calculate how much it needs, and each year it’s underestimated its budget and had to be dug out. This is despite always going higher than last year for each of the fifteen years.<br /><br />This isn’t bad maths. If it were bad maths, they’d have over-estimated at least once. This is something else.<br /><br />Let’s put that in perspective. Let’s say you’re saving for a mortgage, and you decide to cut down on the pints. You budget yourself a fifty-Euro-a-fortnight pinting allowance, and swear never to break it.<br /><br />At the end of the fortnight, you do your sums and you find that instead of blowing fifty Euro on porter, you’ve blown eighty. OK. You were unrealistic in your initial calculation. There are few places in Dublin city centre where you can get a pint for less than a fiver, and five pints a week isn’t even half the weekly limit as set out by the killjoy Department of Health. OK. So you recalibrate, and your new fortnightly pinting budget is now eighty Euro.<br /><br />You examine your spend after this second fortnight and find out you’ve spent one hundred Euro.<br /><br />This isn’t great. Not only are you still over budget, but you’ve doubled your initial estimate. This is bad. You feel bad. You’re not looking forward to telling your girlfriend, who’s counting on you pulling your weight for this mortgage. But at least you know now what the price of booze is. You budget for a hundred bucks this time, and go again.<br /><br />That’s three budgets reader. The Department of Health have got this wrong for fifteen budgets in a row. If that were the case where you were saving for your mortgage, it’s safe to say that you could forget about the mortgage. You could forget about the girlfriend too, as she’d long ago have walked out. But you yourself are not bothered about a mortgage now, of course. Why would you need a mortgage when you now live under a bridge, off your cake on a cocktail of Buckfast and dry sherry all the livelong day?<br /><br />Minister Harris, a man borne down by the sense of his own dignity, is inclined to respond that there is no discretionary spend in Health. If some invalid, some wretched soul, were to call to a hospital, how could the hospital send him or her away?<br /><br />Such an unfortunate should not be sent away, of course. But your faithful correspondent can tell you who should be sent away. The genius who agreed to pay <a href="https://www.rte.ie/news/health/2018/0928/998687-c-ag-health/">€6.5 million per year in rent</a> for the new Department of Health offices eighteen months before anybody actually moves into the place could do with sending away.<br /><br />The only reason whoever is monitoring how well hospital consultants are maintaining their working division between private and public patients while working in public hospitals can’t be sent away because it seems that person doesn’t exist in the first place.<br /><br />According to last week’s report of the <a href="https://static.rasset.ie/documents/news/2018/09/report-accounts-public-services-2017.pdf">Comptroller and Auditor General</a>, no more than 20% of beds in public hospitals are meant to be set aside for private patients. However, beds are considered plain beds, not public beds or private beds, and “the HSE does not draw comparisons on activity levels between hospitals or individual consultants in order to monitor trends in activity over time.” So that’s bound to be going well.<br /><br />You may think your faithful correspondent is picking on the Department of Health. Not at all. Consider this shaggy dog story, as reported in yesterday’s <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/ireland/government-paid-double-for-harold-s-cross-race-track-kf66nrfwl">Times Ireland</a>:<br /><br />The Irish Greyhound Board had their old stadium in Harold’s Cross valued in March of last year. Savills' reckoned it was worth twelve million Euro if developed, six million if it remained a dog track.<br /><br />A few weeks later, the Department of Education asked the Valuation Office to survey the dog track at Harold’s Cross, and see how much it was worth. Harold’s Cross could do with a new school, you see.<br /><br />Where Savills' considered the site worth €12 million, the Valuation Office thought it worth more €23 million. The Department of Education bought the site for €23 million in May of last year. Did the site more than double in value in two months? What exactly are we missing here? Other than our shirts, of course - we lost those long ago.<br /><br />Now. Suppose you’re some sort of nut who thinks maybe the country would be in better shape if we spent money wisely, instead of finding new and, frankly, quite astonishing ways to waste it? For whom exactly should you vote in the coming election? Whom can you trust to get a start on that task?<br /><br />I’ll give you a minute, dear Reader. Then you can go off and find yourself a brick.<br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WY0D79W4rAE/W7vHVjwa6VI/AAAAAAAAD1s/WVBEXodbb64xt5Y3126RrHZ2VK8zcpiJQCLcBGAs/s1600/brick.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WY0D79W4rAE/W7vHVjwa6VI/AAAAAAAAD1s/WVBEXodbb64xt5Y3126RrHZ2VK8zcpiJQCLcBGAs/s320/brick.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">a brick.</td></tr></tbody></table><br />An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-50081828655867643842018-07-26T09:00:00.000+01:002018-07-26T09:00:18.673+01:00Eamon Dunphy and Official Ireland<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2BJAisSl1Hc/W1jf_ckisEI/AAAAAAAAD1E/HlrDbBNJgDM13HwmyYlngjxaFZ6LqOh0ACLcBGAs/s1600/eamon_dunphy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="620" height="220" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2BJAisSl1Hc/W1jf_ckisEI/AAAAAAAAD1E/HlrDbBNJgDM13HwmyYlngjxaFZ6LqOh0ACLcBGAs/s400/eamon_dunphy.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;">A working-class hero is something to be</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;"></span><br />Eamon Dunphy helped elect two Irish governments. No small achievement for anybody. For a man who made his name by claiming not to be part of “Official Ireland,” it’s surely something of a miracle.<br /><br />Dunphy details his first involvement in government formation in his (relatively) recent autobiography, <i>The Rocky Road</i>. It’s in the first few pages, should anybody feel like a browse – investing in the book cannot be recommended.<br /><br />The year is 1993. Dessie O’Malley, the great nearly man of Irish politics, has resigned as leader of the party he founded, the Progressive Democrats. The succession is between two people – Pat Cox, and Mary Harney.<br /><br />Harney is convinced that she is much more popular nationally than Cox. But Cox is the definition of a smooth operator, and the PD parliamentary party is in love with him. What is Mary Harney to do?<br /><br />She explains the situation to a close personal friend. Eamon Dunphy was then writing a much-discussed column on the back page of the <i>Sunday Independent</i>, in which he used to butcher such persons in public life as the editor deemed worthy of butchering.<br /><br />Harney told Dunphy that she knew, just knew, that she was the popular choice, but how to convince the PD parliamentary party? Dunphy discussed the situation with the editor and deputy editor of the <i>Sunday Independent</i> at the time, and persuaded them to run an opinion poll on who was the public’s choice for Dessie O’Malley’s successor. They were reluctant, but Dunphy was a star at the paper and he got his way.<br /><br />The poll showed that Mary Harney was indeed the people’s choice. She beat Pat Cox for the leadership, and went on to lead PDs into the 1997 coalition with Fianna Fáil that shaped contemporary Ireland as we currently know it.<br /><br />And all because of Eamon Dunphy. If she and Dunphy weren’t friends, if Dunphy hadn’t been able to get that poll run in the <i>Sunday Independent</i>, Pat Cox would have become leader of the PDs and the history of the past twenty-five years could be different.<br /><br />That’s power. And fifteen years later, Dunphy anointed another Irish political leader.<br /><br />Shane Ross was part of the Irish political wallpaper for thirty years. He was first elected to the Seanad in 1981, and used to make speeches to nobody in the way that Irish Senators do. He was also Business Editor of the <i>Sunday Independent</i>, where he wrote columns about how the boom could only get boomier.<br /><br />By the time the boom went bust, Eamon Dunphy had reinvented himself yet again. His <i>Sindo</i> bootboy column having gone stale, Dunphy was a radio news/discussion show presenter with a Janus-like presence. Janus was the Roman god of beginnings and endings; representations of Janus show the god with two faces, one facing left, one facing right.<br /><br />Dunphy’s radio persona worked the same way. He still carried himself as the gunfighter, the outsider, the sworn enemy of “Official Ireland.” His actual interviewing style was a most peculiar sort of soft-soap, once both fawning and leading.<br /><br />Those he once excoriated in the <i>Sindo</i> were now leaders of the revolution that would build the new Ireland. A typical Dunphy question at the time would be “Martin McGuinness, is it not the case that you are building a brave new Ireland?” to which McGuinness could but reply why yes, Eamon, yes, I am.<br /><br />And then the crash happened in 2008, and Dunphy found a new hero. His former <i>Sindo</i> colleague, Shane Ross.<br /><br />Dunphy always addressed Ross as Senator in those radio interviews, continuing the Roman theme. “Senator Ross,” he would ask/direct, “is it not the case that official Ireland has acted disgracefully in the matter of the Bank guarantee and that you would have done a much better job had you only been in charge?” Why yes, Eamon. Yes, I would.<br /><br />And now Senator Ross is in charge. Could Shane Ross have got elected without Dunphy folding Ross into his rebel’s cloak? Of the many reinventions in Irish public life, surely Shane Ross as the Champion of the Common Man is the most remarkable.<br /><br />When Europe was ruled by kings and emperors, it was the powers behind the thrones that called the shots. Bismarck for Germany, Metternich for Austria, Martens for Imperial Russia. Ireland is a long way from such power, but for one man to have played so prominent a role in forming two governments says something.<br /><br />This lad Dunphy is a cod. Eamon Dunphy is as much part of "Official Ireland" as dodgy planning permission and guards that lose their phones at inopportune moments. Dunphy's role points out just how innocent, vulnerable and childishly-easily manipulated a people we are, and how very far from being a functional democracy this country is. God help us all.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-54945667876533042582018-07-09T09:00:00.000+01:002018-07-09T09:00:13.893+01:00Liadh Ní Riada Can Win Sinn Féin the Presidency<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tMNiSorv37I/W0KBuHYbfaI/AAAAAAAAD0s/LRgJWL52xxgnAxu20nsCrcfhgwi1Iv0awCLcBGAs/s1600/liadh_ni_riada.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tMNiSorv37I/W0KBuHYbfaI/AAAAAAAAD0w/PGxDUQCIY1QLcBtC7KSWIZtNu4CfS6TIACEwYBhgL/s1600/liadh_ni_riada.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="836" data-original-width="1394" height="119" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tMNiSorv37I/W0KBuHYbfaI/AAAAAAAAD0w/PGxDUQCIY1QLcBtC7KSWIZtNu4CfS6TIACEwYBhgL/s200/liadh_ni_riada.PNG" width="200" /></a></div>Sinn Féin can claim an astonishing double-result this autumn if they contest the Presidency. Firstly, they can strike another devastating blow to Fianna Fáil, who were too quick to row in behind a second term for President Higgins. But more importantly, by selecting Liadh Ní Riada as their candidate, Sinn Féin can make a profound statement of nationalism and Irish identity, the kind of which we haven’t heard in at least half-a-century.<br /><br />Why Ní Riada? Because of who she is and what she represents.<br /><br />Liadh Ní Riada is the daughter of Seán Ó Riada, the man who saved Irish music from doom in the early 1960s. We have made a bags of many, many things as an independent state among the nations of the world, but two things we have to show for ourselves are our games and our music.<br /><br />Before Seán Ó Riada, people were ashamed of the music. It was strictly for hicks. What made the difference was the music’s embrace by Ó Riada, because Ó Riada came from the classical tradition. He knew the table settings, as it were.<br /><br />Ó Riada recognised traditional music’s inherent dignity, and brought it to the concert hall. And people who had thought nothing of the music heard the orchestration of <a href="https://youtu.be/JGPe9qeN_VY">Róisín Dubh that Ó Riada did for Mise Éire</a> and thought: hold on – is that us? To echo Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Irish Nation suddenly realised that this music, which they had considered a joke, poor potsherd, was actually immortal diamond and worthy of admiration all over the world.<br /><br />Ó Riada founded Ceoltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, from whom came the Chieftains. The Clancys and the Dubliners were the beloved sons of the masses but without the Chieftains the music would have sunk back to obscurity. Instead, it lives, survives and thrives.<br /><br /><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qtGbpUXLEp8/W0KBaDFVsCI/AAAAAAAAD0k/okJNSINN5tsWuWPWtXYnFEbE2kcB1DkRwCLcBGAs/s1600/oriada.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; clear: right; color: #0066cc; float: right; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; orphans: 2; text-align: center; text-decoration: underline; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="362" data-original-width="360" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qtGbpUXLEp8/W0KBaDFVsCI/AAAAAAAAD0k/okJNSINN5tsWuWPWtXYnFEbE2kcB1DkRwCLcBGAs/s200/oriada.jpg" width="198" /></a>Seán Ó Riada himself cannot run for the presidency. He died young, in 1971, two months after his fortieth birthday. But Liadh Ní Riada, in coming where she’s from and in being who she is, can be the avatar of what Ó Riada believed in, an Ireland Gaelic, united and free.<br /><br />Because what does the President do, really? The office is the vestigial tail of the Lord Lieutenancy. It’s either a retirement home or a springboard to a cushy job in the UN or the Vatican (although that’s not going so well lately).<br /><br />Perhaps the most important role of the Presidency is in telling us who we are, in being an avatar for the nation. And what better avatar than someone who believes in the causes for which independence was won, at the cost of so much blood?<br /><br />At a time when it’s so hard to say what it is that makes us different, why Ireland deserves nationhood, why, God spare us, the island should be united under one flag, would it be so bad to return to first principles?<br /><br />Even if she were not to win, Liadh Ní Riada could do her party some service in landing another kick to the prone body of what was once the mightiest force in Irish politics, the Fianna Fáil party.<br />Fianna Fáil was once renowned for its profound political sense.<br /><br />DeValera said he only had to look into his heart to know what the nation was thinking. But that political sense is entirely absent from the party now as it lurches from one disaster to another.<br /><br />The confidence-and-supply agreement was a good move. But everybody knew it was, to echo a phrase of the past, “a temporary little arrangement”. There was no way it could be long-lasting, because there would come a threshold when such kudos available to Fianna Fáil for putting the country first by supporting a government would all have been gained.<br /><br />After that, the pendulum swings in the other direction, and Fianna Fáil gets all the blame for being in government, and none of the benefit. Fianna Fáil were always going to pull the plug.<br /><br />Except they didn’t. Opportunities arose one by one, and passed by one by one as Mícheál Martin steadfastly refused to take advantage. The revelations about the Gardaí making up traffic violation reports was the sort of dream chance that oppositions of other eras requested from Santa in their Christmas letters, and still Fianna Fáil held fire.<br /><br />And now, it is they who have presented an open goal to Sinn Féin, in a misunderstanding of both the age and the current political situation.<br /><br />Our is a populist age. It an age of clearing swamps, and giving voices back to the people. It is an age of distrust of the establishment and cosy deals among the members of same.<br /><br />Not only have Fianna Fáil backed President Higgins for a second term, they have done so absolutely, positively, with no way to back down. With Fianna Fáil now backed into a corner - the last place any sensible politician wants to be -&nbsp; Sinn Féin can now run a candidate that hits Fianna Fáil in both the head and the guts.<br /><br />The head, by making Sinn Féin look like a party more interested in what the people think than what is convenient for the establishment. The guts, by fielding a candidate who will be a siren song to the traditional vote of the (once) Republican Party.<br /><br />Can Ní Riada win? Reader, she can win on the first count. She doesn’t even need to say anything. All they need do is play this at her rallies and the Park is hers. Go n-éirí léi.<br /><iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/162v8SeJ1XE?rel=0" width="560"></iframe>An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-70533057354928078612018-07-02T09:00:00.000+01:002018-07-02T09:00:07.589+01:00Mayo Post-Mortem #67: Exhaustion<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rYSCOz0RjLw/WzkWWl7ZXtI/AAAAAAAAD0Y/DDD4naNNo4AIbgnPW-CNq46Uk9gl0-YOQCLcBGAs/s1600/mayo_aidan_oshea_2018.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rYSCOz0RjLw/WzkWWl7ZXtI/AAAAAAAAD0Y/DDD4naNNo4AIbgnPW-CNq46Uk9gl0-YOQCLcBGAs/s320/mayo_aidan_oshea_2018.jpg" width="228" /></a></div>One day you lower the bucket into the well and when you bring it back up the water just won’t be there anymore. That’s the day you know your goose is cooked, and that day arrived for Mayo on Saturday night in Newbridge, in the evening sunlight of this scorching summer.<br /><br />It’s not the only thing that happened, of course. Kildare bet the house on the venue and won, and their players stood up to be counted. Aficionados of the game were teary-eyed at the foot passes of forty and fifty yards finding their men and, if they do nothing else this summer, Kildare will be worth a cheer for reminding the nation of the value of that skill.<br /><br />All Kildare will have their ears pinned to the radio on Monday morning to see what’s next to get in the selection box. It’ll be of academic interest only in Mayo. After seven long summers, it’s going to be odd being locked out while the party goes on.<br /><br />Will Sundays now see lost men and women going into the bookstores and browsing the adult coloring books, or the Danish home design books, or even 12 Simple Steps to Learn Business Cantonese books, as they desperately try to fill the Mayo-sized hole in time that’s opened in their lives? Thank God for porter and Smithwick’s ale – a fine refreshment and a sensible alternative in this hot and heavy weather – for their already-discovered powers of instituting oblivion.<br /><br />There has been end-of-the-line talk about Mayo. It’s understandable, but it’s not fully thought out. Football teams can be understood in the same way the peculiar nature of fire is remembered down the centuries since the Greek philosopher Heraclitus first twigged it. A fire, said Heraclitus, is always changing, and always the same. How can something be changing and always the same? But look at the thing – how else can you describe it?<br /><br />And so with Mayo, as it is with any football team. The pieces come and go, but the team, the movement, the idea, the spirit goes ever on.<br /><br />What makes Saturday seem more of a watershed is that the fire hasn’t been flickering at quite the same rate as it should have been. A team will always change, and managing that dynamic is one of the keys to managing a team.<br /><br />A reluctance to let reality intrude on romance has retarded that natural and necessary process of change, which will make it seem harsher than maybe it might have been when it comes, but there you go. You’re always best pulling off the band-aid in one tug. The ease-it-off approach is kidding yourself.<br /><br />The good news for Mayo is that while Mayo are unusual in their extraordinary ability to not win All-Irelands, they are equally unusual in squandering a bizarre amount of riches in the process of competing for those All-Irelands.<br /><br />Certain people hold that the issue with replacing players was that no players were coming true but that’s just not true. The FBD League was made by God in His workshop in Heaven for the express purpose of having a good look at young players. To use it to put even further miles on old men’s clocks is bizarre.<br /><br />This is the team that started against Sligo in the FBD League in January, as recorded by the unrivalled <a href="http://mayogaablog.com/?page_id=219">Mayo GAA Blog</a>: <i>Clarke; Harrison, Cafferkey, O’Donoghue; Boyle, Hall, Paddy Durcan; Gibbons, Coen; McLoughlin, O’Shea, Diarmuid O’Connor; Doherty, Regan, Andy Moran</i>. Reader: what on earth was the point?<br /><br />But there it is. Rightly or wrongly, very few people think Stephen Rochford will ask for more once his three years run out in the autumn, and that will mean new management, new processes and, God help us all, new hope. One year after Mayo last lost in the Qualifiers, they beat the All-Ireland Champions to begin a seven-year All-Ireland quarter-final winning streak. The players are there. The players are always there. Mayo is always there. Up Mayo.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-61487525165415422132018-05-11T09:00:00.000+01:002018-05-11T09:00:05.957+01:00All-Ireland Championship Cancelled for Next Three Years, Possibly Forever<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Md-6mUMEeGA/WvSfN2_l8wI/AAAAAAAAD0A/Qxq9IyJX2qsBObVEWVmwkFzE0KEyIbmuACLcBGAs/s1600/dublin_kerry-1976.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="669" data-original-width="739" height="289" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Md-6mUMEeGA/WvSfN2_l8wI/AAAAAAAAD0A/Qxq9IyJX2qsBObVEWVmwkFzE0KEyIbmuACLcBGAs/s320/dublin_kerry-1976.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>et in Arcadia ei</i></td></tr></tbody></table>History matters in sports. One of the great joys in the completion of any sports season is the ranking of that season’s Champion among the pantheon of the greats.<br /><br />We kid ourselves doing this, of course. All-Ireland Finals have been played over sixty, seventy and, for a short time in the 1970s, eighty minutes. The catch-and-kick game of the 1960s isn’t the almost-basketball game of the 1980s and the current game is the least like any of its predecessors.<br /><br />What role would Brian Dooher, say, have played in the 1960s? Would the legendary Mick O’Connell of Valentia even get a jersey in this era where high-fielding really isn’t a thing anymore? If you were to play an imaginary game between a team of the 1980s and a current team, how do you even up the playing field?<br /><br />Do you load up the men of the 80s with protein shakes, broccoli and weight programs? Or – your correspondent’s own preference – do you load the contemporary athletes up with warm Smithwick’s ale and a twenty-Carroll’s smoking habit, and see how much they fancy running up and down Croke Park then?<br /><br />All good fun in the pub to while away the winter while the Championship sleeps, ready for another year.<br /><br />Sadly, all that comes to an end this summer. The introduction of the so-called Super 8s means that this year’s Championship, and future Championships to come, are as different to the previous 130 years of competition as a brick is different to an ice cream cone.<br /><br />The Qualifier system put great strain on the Championship by giving the Great Powers a get-out-of-jail free card while claiming to level the playing field for the smaller counties. But for all that, the fact that the eventual All-Ireland Champions still had to play three knockout games meant there was still a hint of what the Championship had been, and should be.<br /><br />How many true knockout games did Kerry have to play in their ‘80s Golden Years? What about Galway coming into the hurling championship at the All-Ireland semi-final stage? Not that awful many.<br /><br />This new age of the Super 8s, however, is a definite break with tradition. There’s no point codding ourselves anymore. Whatever puncher’s chance the underdog had prior to this is now legislated out of existence.<br /><br />Powerful counties that have tradition and money on their side now have the rules of the competition itself in their corner as well. Dublin or Kerry can now lose twice, in their provinces and in the Super 8s, and still be in an All-Ireland semi-final, happy as Larry and licking their lips at the prospect of munching down whatever lambs are fed to their slaughter.<br /><br />Darragh Ó Sé left the yerra behind in his column in the <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/gaelic-games/darragh-%C3%B3-s%C3%A9-everything-before-the-super-eights-is-shadow-boxing-1.3488304">Irish Times</a> during the week. The Provincial Championships doesn’t matter a tu’penny damn any more, according to Darragh. The Championship only begins in July in the Super 8s. Everything prior to that is shadow-boxing.<br /><br />How has this come to pass? How has the Championship been turned on its head without Gaels seeing comets in the sky, or great cliffs falling into the sea, or any of those other portents of great change?<br />It’s all down to Money, of course, long-recognised as the root of all evil.<br /><br />Eugene McGee once opined that the GAA lost its soul when it first agreed to shirt sponsorship. Whatever; whenever it happened the genie is out the bottle now, and there’s no getting him back in without some profound and uncomfortable sacrifice on many people’s part. And neither sacrifice nor restraint is a noted quality of Modern Ireland.<br /><br />Quietly, unnoticed by many, an opinion grew within the Association, fostered by the GPA and their media enablers, that the GAA has a duty to offer the elite athletes of the nation a space or forum to display their gifts. This, aligned with Croke Park Teoranta’s insatiable desire for dollars, combined to bring about our woe.<br /><br />The GAA that existed to provide the opportunity to play Gaelic games to as many people as wanted to play them has been pushed aside by a new organisation, eager to grab some of that sports/leisure industry revenue. The cuckoo has taken over the nest, and the end is nigh for the GAA as we knew it.<br /><br />We are now on the slope that will tumble us, sooner than we think, towards a professional league of maybe eight football teams, six hurling. They’ll call themselves Leinster Lions or Breffni Badgers or the Earl of Desmond’s Rangers, and they’ll have woolly mascots that the kids love and it won’t be too bad, really, and we’ll get used to it sooner than we think, even whingers like your correspondent. But what it won’t be is what we once had, the pearl worth more than all our tribe that was the Championship.<br /><br />Which makes it all the more important to speak truth to power now, before we are lost, and identify what it is that is before us. This new Super 8s Championship is a damnable thing. It is despicable, hateful, monstrous. It is an abomination, an affront in the sight of Almighty God.<br /><br />And somehow it is here, all set to ruin the summer like one thousand showers or one million protests on the Garvaghy Road. It is a crime and a sin that the Super 8s now rig the Championship to ensure that only the rich can survive. We should shed a tear and keen a lament for that which is lost. We surely own it that much after all these years.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-7494278143116848072018-05-08T09:00:00.000+01:002018-05-08T09:00:06.690+01:00Why Mayo Don't Win All-Irelands<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XQAhY8LzwpE/WvBMI_03EKI/AAAAAAAADzw/TIVUfhPVv2McvFsUhOhpLrT49tRozBYvQCLcBGAs/s1600/mayo_through_the_years.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="600" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XQAhY8LzwpE/WvBMI_03EKI/AAAAAAAADzw/TIVUfhPVv2McvFsUhOhpLrT49tRozBYvQCLcBGAs/s320/mayo_through_the_years.png" width="320" /></a></div>The Irish Examiner’s Kieran Shannon wrote a marvellous profile of <a href="https://www.irishexaminer.com/sport/gaa/football/the-kieran-shannon-interview-tommy-guilfoyle--the-previous-captain-455410.html">Tommy Guilfoyle</a>, the greatest Clare hurler of whom you’ve never heard, last summer. Tommy Guilfoyle was, and is, a prince. He is all that you could ask a man to be.<br /><br />Guilfoyle's hurling career was dominated by injuries as freakish as they were frightening, and also he had to deal with the sort of personal tragedy that puts all those games we play in their true perspective. Tommy Guilfoyle spent the early ‘90s meeting with Triumph and Disaster, and treating both imposters the same.<br /><br />And then, in 1994, it all came together. Injury free at last, Guilfoyle was back playing with the county and reminded the Banner of his talent by hammering two goals home against Tipperary, hated Tipperary, in a league semi-final in Limerick.<br /><br />Ger Loughnane then took over as Clare manager at the end of the 1994 Championship. Loughnane is from Feakle, the same club as Tommy Guilfoyle, and Loughnane had trained Guilfoyle at Under-14. For Clare hurling, 1995 was going to be The Year.<br /><br />And so 1995 was – just not for Tommy Guilfoyle. When Loughnane selected his panel for the 1995 Championship, Guilfoyle wasn’t on it. Guilfoyle wasn’t happy about this, and held it against Loughnane for sixteen years. And then news broke of Loughnane’s cancer battle and Guilfoyle, like the gentleman he is, put things in perspective and renewed his friendship with the man who denied him an All-Ireland medal.<br /><br />Why didn’t Loughnane pick Guilfoyle? For this reason: Loughnane knew exactly the sort of team he wanted playing for Clare, and exactly what it would take to make them. The brutality of Clare’s training in 1995 is well documented.<br /><br />Loughnane knew Guilfoyle couldn’t take that sort of punishment after all he had been through, and Loughnane also knew that there were no half-measures. No exceptions could be made. Everyone had to get equal treatment. And so, in the name winning, Loughnane cut Tommy Guilfoyle’s heart <span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">out </span>and threw it in the bin.<br /><br />If Tommy Guilfoyle had been a Mayoman, his would have been the first name down on every team sheet in 1995, and Clare would still be waiting for an All-Ireland. Clare people would love Tommy Guilfoyle and happily fight anyone who dared besmirch him or question his right to stand in the pantheon with Leahy and Whelehan and Pilkington.<br /><br />But they wouldn’t know what it was like to hear the Clare shout ring out from Jones’ Road all the way west to the crashing waves of the broad Atlantic itself, as the team came home to the torchlights with the Liam McCarthy cup on the front of the bus. They’d still be waiting on that particular joy.<br /><br />In Mayo we think they’re big-time because of all these finals we’ve been in. Mayo are everyone’s second county and we lap that plamás up like cats at a saucer of milk. We never stop to ask if all that milk is any good to us, or if it’d be any harm to have a shot of whiskey now and again instead, to put hair on the chest.<br /><br />Anthony Daly was Ger Loughnane’s captain when the curse of Biddy Earley was broken in 1995. Nineteen years later, he resigned as Dublin hurling manager after Tipperary hammered Dublin into the ground in a quarter-final. He was doing colour commentary on RTÉ radio some weeks later when Limerick put up a heroic-but-doomed stand against Kilkenny in the All-Ireland semi-final on a wet day in Croke Park.<br /><br />Joanne Cantwell asked Daly what TJ Ryan, the Limerick manager, would be feeling on the sideline. Daly, as ever, didn’t hold back. TJ Ryan will be proud of his men, said Daly, and would not feel the scalding humiliation Daly himself felt when he watched Tipperary lay waste to Dublin from the Dublin sideline earlier in the summer.<br /><br />Daly went on to talk about the welcome the Limerick players would get back home, and how everyone would congratulate them on how well they played and commiserate them on their bad luck. They don’t commiserate you on back luck in Kilkenny, mused Daly; if Kilkenny had let a chance to win slip as Limerick had done, they’d go off and pick a team that wouldn’t let that happen. No forgiveness.<br /><br />That’s the difference, said Daly. If you want to be big-time you have to be ruthless. You have to be able to cut the beating heart right out of your best friend and throw it in the bin like it’s nothing more to you than a chewing-gum wrapper. Winning has a price and if you can’t pay it, you can’t have it.<br /><br />Up Mayo.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-2834961108530504932018-02-26T09:00:00.000+00:002018-02-26T09:00:00.229+00:00TV3's Rugby Coverage<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Yw0KsisoBUI/WpMkrUi-QmI/AAAAAAAADzU/PBxwuPFcUJc2m5RWkI9KJqHN6Nd6z_gtwCLcBGAs/s1600/alan_quinlan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="362" data-original-width="540" height="133" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Yw0KsisoBUI/WpMkrUi-QmI/AAAAAAAADzU/PBxwuPFcUJc2m5RWkI9KJqHN6Nd6z_gtwCLcBGAs/s200/alan_quinlan.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Quinny. Great, fantastic, brilliant.</td></tr></tbody></table>As a colour commentator, TV3's Alan Quinlan is a little on the black-and-white side. It's hard to know why this is the case - Quinlan worked with Sky Sports before TV3 won the Six Nations, and his fearsome reputation as a player would suggest that he knows where bodies are buried.<br /><br />None of that came through in his commentary on the Ireland v Wales game on Saturday. It's disappointing, not least because the game is difficult to analyse.<br /><br />If Ireland were so good, why were Wales within three points of snatching a result at the death? How did Ireland overcome the losses of Henshaw, Henderson and Furlong (to say nothing of Farmer Seán O'Brien)?<br /><br />Were the replacements so good that suddenly Ireland has discovered a rich seam of international players? Were the missing players maybe not-all-that-exceptional in the first place? Or is it the case that the system is more important than the man in modern rugby, especially in Joe Schmidt's particularly mechanised vision of the ancient game?<br /><br />These are the questions Quinlan should elucidate for us as the game progresses, not least as modern rugby is so very technical now. Just as the missing nail cost a kingdom, so a man coming in the wrong side of a ruck can now cost a Championship. It's hard to keep up.<br /><br />It's likely that Quinlan does know all this. He won a lot with Munster when Munster were as gods in Ireland, so he must have figured something out along the way. But whatever that is, he's either unwilling or unable to share with the viewer.<br /><br />Quinlan's delivery is odd - when he speaks there's a breathless quality to him, like a man whispering at the top of his voice. He's always excited, which is the same as never being excited. He tends to say "Watch Sexton here", or "watch Best here" but never goes on tell us why - either because he's too excited or expects we can discern patterns in the hillocks and drumlins of red- and green-clad beef strewn about the five-metre line without a guide.<br /><br />Also, for a man who is relatively new to the job, Quinlan has developed two peculiar quirks in his commentary. Quinlan is very prone to the colour commentator's capital error of repeating what the main commentator just said. In an effort to perhaps disguise this, Quinlan elides his remarks to simply listing the players names. "Best, Murray, Sexton, Earls!" he roars. "Sander, Farrell, Sander, Murray!" "John, Paul, George and Ringo!" "Matthew, Mark, Luke and John!"<br /><br />The more surreal of these quirks is Quinlan's extraordinary reliance on adjectives. This is something he's almost certainly unaware of - who thinks of parts of speech when they speak? - but it is almost certainly unique to him. There are many poor colour commentators - Tommy "Tom" Carr springs to mind - but the adjective stream is a new one on me.<br /><br />Your correspondent was watching the game for the first twenty minutes before the penny dropped about Quinlan's reliance on adjectives. After that, to keep score on each one was, with me, the work of the next sixty minutes.<br /><br />Alan Quinlan used fifteen different adjectives to describe play in those sixty minutes. There is a case to be made that he used sixteen, if you consider "what a" an adjectival form - what a kick, what a pass, what a tackle. Sadly, it took me a little too long to twig and I did not keep score of that one. I'll be ready again.<br /><br />On the others, he used seven adjectives once and once only - <i>bad</i>, <i>big</i>, <i>effective</i>, <i>impressive</i>, <i>incredible</i>, <i>super</i>, and <i>tremendous</i>.<br /><br /><i>Huge</i> and <i>massive</i> were called to the front twice. <i>Wonderful</i> was used three times, <i>dangerous</i> five, <i>good</i> eight, <i>fantastic</i> eleven, <i>brilliant</i> twelve and, the clear winner with thirty-four carries across the gain-line was <i>great</i>. Great kick, great catch, great tackle, great offload, great ruck, great maul. And so on and on and on.<br /><br />The Quinlan adjectives are relentlessly positive. The only negative adjective Quinlan used in those sixty minutes was bad, and he only used it once.<br /><br />Quinlan used dangerous five times but, in rugby, that can be seen as a compliment. Whenever Quinlan himself was described as dangerous in his playing days, it was always meant as a compliment - unless used by the citing commissioner, of course. From this we can only conclude that not only has Alan Quinlan taken some sort of Positive Thinking course, he's come out the other side. Brilliant.<br /><br />Back in studio, Shane Jennings is a thoughtful analyst but, in an unfortunate echo of international career, he struggles to get noticed above the sulphurous hot air of his gasbag co-analysts. Reader, your humble correspondent would happily spend an hour listening to the Minister for Finance, Mr Pascal Donaghue, TD, extemporise on the Irish income tax bands viz-a-viz European tax harmonisation with particular regard to corporation tax and the liquidity of the sovereign than ever hear one more word on the subject of rugby from either Shane "Shaggy" Horgan or Matt "Maddie" Williams. At least neither Franno nor Hookie have made their way to Ballymount - a small mercy for which a nation offers its grateful thanks.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-4737872762496383552018-01-18T09:00:00.000+00:002018-01-18T09:01:08.404+00:00Social Media Ninjas and the Eighth Amendment<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kqfWKeSHAhw/Wl_A5BNvCxI/AAAAAAAADzE/i4XBHt4BZqMe--6FvWPlqtZ8rajIO0qmACLcBGAs/s1600/eighth_amendment_ctte.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="304" data-original-width="400" height="243" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kqfWKeSHAhw/Wl_A5BNvCxI/AAAAAAAADzE/i4XBHt4BZqMe--6FvWPlqtZ8rajIO0qmACLcBGAs/s320/eighth_amendment_ctte.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Eighth Amendment Committee</td></tr></tbody></table>The Times Ireland edition led yesterday with a story about an (unnamed) Irish anti-abortion campaign group that has <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/ireland/anti-abortion-group-hires-kanto-agency-that-pushed-brexit-hfnklf3kk">hired a company called Kanto</a> to handle the digital side of things once the campaigning starts.<br /><br />Kanto was founded by one Thomas Borwick, who describes himself as the Chief Technology Officer of the Vote Leave Brexit campaign, and the story goes on to speculate that, because of the tactics used in the Brexit campaign, the hiring of Kanto and Mr Borwick “will raise fears about the Eighth Amendment referendum.”<br /><br />Maybe. Maybe not.<br /><br />The definitive book of the Brexit campaign is <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/All-Out-War-Britains-Political/dp/0008215154">All-Out War</a>, written by Tim Shipman, chief political correspondent of the Times’s sister paper, the Sunday Times. It’s 662 pages of small type in paperback, 26 of which are a fairly comprehensive index. Neither Thomas Borwick nor Kanto are mentioned anywhere in those 26 pages.<br /><br />In the index section dealing with Vote Leave, we are directed to ‘and digital campaign, 414-19, 421, 424-25, 464.’ Thomas Borwick isn’t mentioned there either.<br /><br />Shipman identifies Vote Leave’s digital campaign as a key part of the shock victory. On pages 414 to 419 of his very readable book, Shipman identifies the key players – Henry de Zoete, digital director. Zack Massingham, of a Canadian social media company called AggregateIQ.<br /><br />And there were three astrophysicists from the west coast of the USA who were brought in to crunch numbers in the same manner Wall Street hired physicists to construct models to persuade people to invest in subprime mortgages before August, 2008. We can’t be sure, but it’s unlikely that Thomas Borwick was one of those astrophysicists.<br /><br />A quick Google revealed some, but not very many, references to Borwick as CTO of Vote Leave, most notably a piece by <span id="goog_903940430"></span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy">Carol Cadwalladr<span id="goog_903940431"></span> in the Guardian</a>. And the man himself is not sparing in singing his own praises on his <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-borwick-7727167/">LinkedIn page</a> with regard to his work with Vote Leave: “I have gone through the process of everything from wire framing websites to daily scrum meetings and planning our central database system for 43 million voters and maintaining an 80 user computer system.”<br /><br />Just below the Experience section in LinkedIn, as the great world knows, is the Skills section. The specific computer skills Borwick lists are Microsoft Office, Microsoft Excel and HTML. Quite a modest list for the Chief Technology Officer of a system sitting on a 43-million-row database that was used to create the biggest political upheaval in Great Britain since the Glorious Revolution of 1689.<br /><br />Your correspondent has no fears for Thomas Borwick’s PR career. Borwick’s father is Jamie Borwick, 5th Baron Borwick, and his mother, Victoria Lorne Peta Borwick, Baroness Borwick, is a former Deputy Mayor of London and MP for Kensington. The family have a coat of arms – three bears’ heads, a row of three eight-pointed-stars, all on a white background. One imagines even the haughty Lannisters sitting up and taking notice.<br /><br />What this means is the man has contacts. If you hire Kanto, you get access right into the ventricles of the beating heart of the British establishment. What you may be less likely to get is the sort of computer savant that the unnamed Irish anti-abortion group may be expecting. Whoever that anti-abortion group is, it is to be hoped they kept the receipt.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-58116680308578886352018-01-15T09:00:00.000+00:002018-01-15T09:00:20.079+00:00On Referendums<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-uqRVaFs0Cro/WluqZKIxhEI/AAAAAAAADy0/LOxeFOryiqQeri88hdHrnTLB2gu1BtIdwCLcBGAs/s1600/williamBenchyMaryRobinson1983.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="305" data-original-width="630" height="154" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-uqRVaFs0Cro/WluqZKIxhEI/AAAAAAAADy0/LOxeFOryiqQeri88hdHrnTLB2gu1BtIdwCLcBGAs/s320/williamBenchyMaryRobinson1983.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The 'eighties, man.</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: Calibri;">RTÉ are guilty of some sloppy reporting of Ms Mary Laffoy’s remarks at the opening of the latest meeting of the Citizens’ Assembly in Malahide on Saturday last. <a href="https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2018/0113/933050-citizens-assembly/">RTÉ tell us</a> that “Ms Mary Laffoy told the members that the holding of referendums is a fundamental part of democracy,” but what <a href="https://www.citizensassembly.ie/en/Meetings/Opening-Speech-Saturday.pdf">MsLaffoy actually said</a> was “The holding of a referendum is a fundamental component of our democracy.”</span><br /> <br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><br /></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The “our” is important. They never hold referendums in the USA. They hold them all the time in Switzerland. They are held very rarely in the United Kingdom and, after the unmitigated disaster of the last one, they will think long and hard before calling the next.</span></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><br /></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Ireland holds referendums to change the constitution because the constitution dictates that it can only be changed through referendum. The current constitution succeeded the Free State Constitution in 1937. The Free State constitution was changed by act of parliament, as the US constitution is. This is what happened to the infamous Oath of Allegiance – De Valera and Fianna Fáil dumped it in jig time, and quickly took apart other provisions of that Free State constitution that they found equally objectionable.</span></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><br /></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">There then being nothing left but the bones, Fianna wrote up a new constitution which was accepted by the people in 1937. Eighty years ago, and counting.</span></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><br /></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">There were fourteen referendums held in the first fifty years of the Constitution, of which ten passed and four failed. There were twenty-five more amendments passed in the next thirty years, and more failed referendums than your correspondent could be bothered counting (the numbering on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amendments_to_the_Constitution_of_Ireland">Wikipedia</a> seems a little inconsistent).</span></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><br /></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">As European integration continues referendums will be needed more often and will be less and less suited to changing the constitution. Referendums are suited to broad-stroke topics, rather than Brusselspeak. The legalese will be too subtle to be suited to a referendum debate and vote, and it is the nature of referendums that when people are in doubt, they will vote no to be on the safe side.</span></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><br /></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The idea of representative democracy is that the people shouldn’t have to wade through this sort of legalise to make decisions. The sovereign people elect representatives to carry out their wishes, and its those elected representatives that are to do the wading through the legal thickets. If the people dislike how their representatives do that wading, they elect some other representatives. Representative democracy.</span></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><br /></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">However. The nation is now lumbered with a series of problems when it comes to referendums. The first problem is that the Ireland of 2017 is starkly different to the Ireland of 1937 and the constitution is no longer suited to the governance of the country. Ireland needs a new constitution.</span></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><br /></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The second problem is that while the population is better educated in such things as skills and diet, we are less educated as regards civics, public standards, public behaviour and the very definition of nationhood. This is part of a general western malaise of course, but a small country like ours should have been better able to hold its public representatives to account.</span></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><br /></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Whatever the reasons, the fact is that if a new constitution were written by a joint committee of Pericles of Athens, Thomas Jefferson of the United States and Cú Chulainn, the Hound of Ulster, it still wouldn’t get passed because a combination of cranks, demagogues, ne’er-do-wells and out-and-out fools would get together to find a fault, any fault, and persuade a scared and gullible electorate to take no chances boys, take no chances, you wouldn’t know what they’d be up to. Don’t take a chance!</span></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><br /></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The third problem is that the current crop of public representatives are rather in love with the idea of referendums, as it means they don’t have to take responsibility for what they were elected to do. Taking responsibility is about the last thing they want to do.</span></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><br /></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/referendum-tracker">A craven reaction to the Abortion referendum</a> is only to be expected, of course. But the twenty members of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Funding of Domestic Water Charges voted unanimously – unanimously! – in favour of a <a href="http://www.thejournal.ie/irish-water-referendum-public-ownership-3277459-Mar2017/">referendum on the ownership of the nation’s water</a>ten months ago. There were usual suspects on that committee but there were also politicians there who aspire to governing the country, and who should hang their heads in shame. By whom I mean Barry Cowen, Alan Farrell, Kate O’Connell, Willie O’Dea, Lorraine Clifford-Lee and maybe one or two others. The full membership is <a href="http://www.oireachtas.ie/parliament/oireachtasbusiness/committees_list/futurefundingofdomesticwaterservices/members/">here</a>.</span></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><br /></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The chances of any government addressing this referendum issue and the datedness of the constitution are, of course, extremely slim. They’re quite content with this piecemeal, heads-down, rock-no-boat agenda while the European super-state is being built and Ireland is left out. Until the day comes when the Taoiseach of the day is called to Brussels and told there isn’t going to be an Irish constitution any more.</span></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><br /></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">He or she will be told that the country’s economy has crashed four times and being bailed out three, and no matter how often you’re told you’re told that your insistence on seeing houses as capital assets, your limiting of access to justice to those who can pay and your inability to police the country is scandalous, shameful and a bridge too far, the penny just won’t drop. We’re sorry Paddy, but we’re taking the keys of the car. You’ll be much safer with us to mind you.</span></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><br /></div><br /><div style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But, of course, it will be too late to cry about it then. The British are ninety-five years gone. We have no-one to blame but ourselves.</span></div><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span>An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-81900846441426240582017-12-28T09:00:00.000+00:002017-12-28T09:00:05.394+00:00The Year in Sports<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Oqe1_PB78Hc/WkQk70F_xAI/AAAAAAAADyQ/Pnzv7r-rLsw3CJl1ooeYSe7hJUdpRHAKQCLcBGAs/s1600/dublin_ogara_rock_mccarthy_allireland2017.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="620" height="220" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Oqe1_PB78Hc/WkQk70F_xAI/AAAAAAAADyQ/Pnzv7r-rLsw3CJl1ooeYSe7hJUdpRHAKQCLcBGAs/s400/dublin_ogara_rock_mccarthy_allireland2017.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>The businessmen who run Croke Park are not noted for their wit. A pity; should it be a thing that Dublin win a fourth All-Ireland title in a row, wouldn’t it be funny if the traditional post-match playing of Molly Malone were swapped for Linda Ronstadt’s rather super cover of the Everly Brothers’ classic <a href="https://youtu.be/5-lP5oHU6E4">When Will I Be Loved</a>? It would seem to strike the correct note.<br /><br />The apparent disdain in which the team is held isn’t easy to understand. Pilar Caffrey’s Dublin, with their notorious Blue Book, were difficult to love. But the Gilroy / Gavin generation are the real deal. They are legit in every way a GAA team can be legit, and yet still Ireland withholds its heart.<br /><br />Part of this may be jealousy. It would be nice to think there’s more too it than that, but there probably isn’t. Would Kerry of the Golden Years be held in the same regard as they are had they not be rendered mortal by Offaly in 1982?<br /><br />When Meath were in their dark pomp in the 1980s they were hated. Has time humanised them, or was it the loss to Down (not to take anything away from that fine Down team) in 1991 that had the same humanising effect on them as Offaly’s win had on Kerry?<br /><br />Those greybeards who remember when snooker was a big deal may remember Steve Davis was never loved until he was past his prime; then he became the Grand Old Man of the Green Baize. Is Ireland waiting on Dublin to lose, to return to the mortal realm, before forgiving them for being so much better than the rest? And when is that to happen, exactly?<br /><br />Reader, I’m damned if I know. Mayo are in pole position among the challengers for the crown, but the trauma of thinking about my own beloved county actually winning an All-Ireland and all that would imply would reduce your correspondent to writing with crayons on greaseproof paper behind high walls and under medical supervision, so let’s not go there just yet, while the season of brotherhood and goodwill is still with us.<br /><br />The reality is that it is hard to make a case for anyone living with Dublin, to say nothing of beating them. Leinster is a wasteland and, no more than Mayo, Monaghan and Tyrone can only knock on the door for so long.<br /><br />Kerry remain Kerry, of course, and the impact of the disgraceful Super 8s remains to be seen, but it’s very hard to imagine any team better suited to a Super 8 structure than the current Dublin setup. Tradition, legend, values – may I introduce you to the Almighty Dollar? God help us all.<br /><br /><b>Hurling</b><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>When historians get around to recording and passing judgement on these changing times, will the publication of Jackie Tyrell’s book be seen as the most significant event of 2017 in hurling? We’ve waited for over a decade for an insight into Kilkenny in the Cody era. Now we have it, does it take from the achievements of that great team? At what stage is a title not worth winning? At what stage can you say a team has gone too far, and it becomes necessary to remind people that sport isn’t life and death; sport is what we concern ourselves with when we need a break from life and death. It’s something to think about.<br /><b><br /></b><b>Rugby</b><br />As Gaelic Games slide further from shamatuerism to fully-blown professionalism, it’s interesting – and horrifying – to look at rugby, which has been professional for 22 years. What has survived, what has thrived, and what has gone by the wayside.<br /><br />Who would have thought, for instance, that domestic French rugby would set the standard for the world game, and that this club standard would come at the expense of the French national team, once the personification of a way of looking at the world that is quintessentially French?<br /><br />The current situation cannot last, but what will come in its place nobody knows. The fruits of the banal weekly brutality of the professional game is also a harvest that has yet to be gathered, and will not be nice when it is. Dónal Lenihan made this point very well in his very thoughtful and under-estimated <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Donal-Lenihan-My-Life-Rugby/dp/184827226X">autobiography</a>, released last year.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>The Lions Tour, once described by the late Frank Keating as a cross between a school tour and a medieval crusade, was one of those institutions marked for doom when the game went professional, but went from strength to strength instead. On the balance sheet, anyway; neither the heads nor the hearts of fans seem quite sure what to make of the Lions, just as they don’t quite know where club competitions, Six Nations Tournaments and World Cups fit in relative to each other. In the light of Seán O’Brien’s strident opinion of the second-most successful Lions tour of New Zealand in over 110 years, maybe even the players are struggling to keep up. Or it could be all those bumps to the head, of course.<br /><br />Rugby fans in Ireland are at a particular disadvantage as Irish rugby journalists take the notion of fans-with-typewriters to new depths. What Martin O’Neill wouldn’t do for the coverage Joe Schmidt gets, even though Martin O’Neill has nothing like the talent available to Schmidt.<br /><br />Certainly, Schmidt’s artisanal style of rugby has never got the abuse that O’Neill’s hearts-on-their-sleeves, lead-in-their-boots soccer team habitually get, even though Schmidt has a better selection. And that’s not even counting the chaps who make Michael Flatley of the Clan Flatley seem as Irish as the very Blarney Stone itself.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-50566192554114962972017-11-28T08:36:00.001+00:002017-11-28T08:36:18.323+00:00The Current Political Situation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DMOfcP60GHI/Wh0eB4agXxI/AAAAAAAADx0/2pfS1NgVcyw5Ayy06VdVZcy73jFMnvQigCLcBGAs/s1600/noirin_osullivan_frances_fitzgerald.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="533" height="205" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DMOfcP60GHI/Wh0eB4agXxI/AAAAAAAADx0/2pfS1NgVcyw5Ayy06VdVZcy73jFMnvQigCLcBGAs/s320/noirin_osullivan_frances_fitzgerald.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Whatever else is to befall the unhappy nation on this pivotal day in Irish politics, it has to be hoped that An Taoiseach has kept his receipt for the five million or so Euro he spent on a <a href="http://www.thejournal.ie/strategic-communications-unit-cost-3639125-Oct2017/">Strategic Communications Unit</a>. If they hadn’t ballsed-up the Thursday messaging, the government would not be on the edge of a precipice today.<br /><br />The minutiae of who read what email when doesn’t matter in terms of the government's survival. Fianna Fáil have been watching the government, and the government watching Fianna Fáil, since the budget. Both know the end of the confidence-and-supply agreement is close; neither wants to be left being reactive to the other when the thing goes wallop and it’s time to face the people.<br /><br />The latest McCabe revelations resulted in Sinn Féin tabling a motion of no confidence in the Tánaiste on Thursday of last week. This left Fianna Fáil in a dilemma; if they went against the Sinn Féin motion and something else broke about the state’s disgraceful treatment of Sergeant McCabe, Fianna Fáil lose ground to Sinn Féin.<br /><br />Fianna Fáil cannot lose (further) ground to Sinn Féin because Sinn Féin will get a boost from a new face on the posters and from the fact that Sinn Féin represents the greatest potential change in the election anyway. Every electorate dreams of the far-away fields.<br /><br />Therefore, Fianna Fáil had no option but to declare their own motion of no confidence in the Tánaiste. They missed a trick badly in not pulling the plug during the final days of Enda Kenny, when the disgraceful story about the breathalyser-fixing by the Gardaí broke. That would have been perfect, because the issue was so clear-cut and easily understandable. Fianna Fáil could not lose another opportunity.<br /><br />In the light of this, the sensible play on Fine Gael’s part would have been to either keep schtum or else jettison Frances Fitzgerald with the greatest dispatch. You may say this would have been grossly unfair on Mrs Fitzgerald; reader, what’s fair got to do with it? This is politics, the dirtiest game there is.<br /><br />Alan Shatter lost his job on the basis of political expediency. The noted moralists of the Labour Party defenestrated the Taoiseach that brokered the first ceasefire in Northern Ireland in a fit of political pique. Charlie Haughey, to echo Jeremy Thorpe’s famous quip about Harold MacMillan’s night of the long knives, laid down his friend for his life in 1990. That’s politics.<br /><br />However. Fine Gael did not take this sensible option. Instead, Fine Gael went on the offensive, with Eoghan Murphy, a man without whom Leo Varadkar would not now be Taoiseach, delivered a studs-up performance in defence of Frances Fitzgerald’s honour on Prime Time last Thursday that bet the farm on Fianna Fáil backing down.<br /><br />This was an extraordinarily naïve decision. All politicians like wriggle room, but Irish politicians need it most of all. Fine Gael’s public doubling-down on the Tánaiste means that any concession to Fianna Fáil looks like a climbdown. Sinn Féin had already closed off Fianna Fáil on one flank; Fine Gael’s outrage that anybody should look crossways at their Tánaiste left Fianna Fáil with no option but to light the fuse.<br /><br />As Sarah Bardon of the Irish Times pointed out yesterday on Twitter, the messaging from the government has softened considerably since Thursday:<br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><div dir="ltr" lang="en">Language has changed over weekend. Simon Coveney was calling Fianna Fail reckless on Friday. Today he "accepts" their call for political accountability</div>— Sarah Bardon (@SarahBardon) <a href="https://twitter.com/SarahBardon/status/935090217656242176?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 27, 2017</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />And that’s all fine, but Fianna Fáil remain in a Grand-Old-Duke-of-York dilemma. All these things have to be understood in the context of the general election that will be fought early next year, if not before Christmas. How will Fianna Fáil’s argument of being responsible and putting the nation first stack up against Sinn Féin’s constant attack of Fianna Fáil being part of an elite that is willing to stoop to anything to keep itself in power, instead of doing the right thing in the name of that good man who was wronged, Maurice McCabe?<br /><br /><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7YMjcCXOw8g/Wh0fHLRSMbI/AAAAAAAADyA/B4YBX5yfOiUCgA0CGvZct1FhfAT6gvEJwCLcBGAs/s1600/se7en_box_scene.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a>Politics is broad strokes. How do subtleties about changes to the Department of Justice work as broad strokes? Badly, is the answer. For Fianna Fáil, anything less than the Tánaiste’s head is a Sinn Féin win. In the light of this, Fine Gael’s only chance of limiting the damage would be for Frances Fitzgerald to do a Sidney Danton before marching bravely to the guillotine, and hope to be avenged in the election after Christmas. A cobbled-together compromise means an early Christmas for Sinn Féin HQ as their long march to power comes three to five seats nearer.<br /><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7YMjcCXOw8g/Wh0fHLRSMbI/AAAAAAAADyA/B4YBX5yfOiUCgA0CGvZct1FhfAT6gvEJwCLcBGAs/s1600/se7en_box_scene.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="348" data-original-width="620" height="179" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7YMjcCXOw8g/Wh0fHLRSMbI/AAAAAAAADyA/B4YBX5yfOiUCgA0CGvZct1FhfAT6gvEJwCLcBGAs/s320/se7en_box_scene.png" width="320" /></a><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-85157834076935093192017-10-23T09:00:00.000+01:002017-10-23T09:00:18.702+01:00Mayo Post-Mortem #66: Open Verdict<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UqLtsEOBl3A/WezkAM8MIuI/AAAAAAAADxk/oN6x0XJ47XoHkaZkwQyApFa47seVXBvgwCLcBGAs/s1600/mayo_lee_keegan_dublin_dean_rock_2017.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="583" data-original-width="960" height="194" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UqLtsEOBl3A/WezkAM8MIuI/AAAAAAAADxk/oN6x0XJ47XoHkaZkwQyApFa47seVXBvgwCLcBGAs/s320/mayo_lee_keegan_dublin_dean_rock_2017.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Recordings of both Sky and RTÉ’s coverage of this year’s All-Ireland Football Final sit on my Virgin Media box, like the regions of dark matter in outer space that so fascinate the astrophysicists currently. I have no intention of watching them, but I can’t delete them either. A situation that is bizarrely appropriate for this particular Final, suddenly the hardest of all Mayo’s many All-Ireland Final losses to come to terms with.<br /><br />One of sport’s eternal debates is whether it hurts more to get hammered into the turf or to lose by inches. It’s the sporting equivalent of whether it’s better to get punched in the face or the guts. Neither is great, really, but is possible to make a case that one is worse than the other?<br /><br />There’s something different about this year’s Final though. It’s not a question of so near and yet so far for Mayo, the way 1996 was, say. It’s something different. But what exactly that difference is remains stubbornly hidden in the dark matter that exists beyond the stars, and in the tortured psyche of the Mayo football public.<br /><br />Partly it’s got to do with the mixed records of the two competing teams. The narrative is that a hairsbreadth separates them. The reality is that Dublin always win, and Mayo always lose.<br /><br />Dublin, we are told, are one of the best teams ever, if not the best team ever. Mayo can’t win an All-Ireland Final, despite appearing in them with almost monotonous regularity. Other teams have risen and fallen in the past twenty years – Mayo keep regenerating to be almost there, but just not quite. Just that little bit missing, every time.<br /><br />Is there a lesson there? Are All-Ireland generations essentially destructive, like the economic cycle? Is it the case that every boom must be followed by a bust? And is that why Mayo have never fallen from Division 1, because they never boomed sufficiently to go bust?<br /><br />It’s a theory. One of many, and not the strongest. The reality of Mayo’s perpetual losing of All-Ireland Finals is more likely to be prosaic than metaphysical. The fault is more likely to be in ourselves than in our stars.<br /><br />It’s that logical impossibility that exists in the two states of Dublin and Mayo that makes processing the 2017 Final so difficult from a Mayo perspective. If Dublin are one of the greatest teams of all-time, then surely the only team that’s put them regularly under pressure is also somewhere in the pantheon of all-time greats. But entry to that pantheon necessitates possession of a title, and that’s something that Mayo have failed to achieve. Armagh won. Cork won. Donegal won. Mayo ... lost.<br /><br />A narrative has been proposed whereby, even if they were never to win an All-Ireland, the current Mayo generation would be remembered as one of the all-time great teams. A visit to a Galway football Facebook page a week or two after the All-Ireland Final would quickly disabuse the innocent of that theory. No Celtic cross, no nothin’. Plenty of teams that have won All-Irelands are disparaged as having won “soft” ones. How soft is the one that is not won at all?<br /><br />And so we come back to the circle that can’t be squared. We have, in the green-and-red corner, one of the all-time great teams that not only can’t achieve what all-time great teams achieve – win multiple All-Irelands – but can’t achieve what legitimate-and-deserving-champions but not all-time-great teams do, and manage to somehow fall over the line. Cork fell over the line. Armagh were damnably unlucky not to win a second All-Ireland, but the Geezer generation got their Celtic Crosses. For this Mayo generation – nada. And for some on the panel it’s already too late.<br /><br />There’s a new ethos in Mayo whereby any criticism of the team – who owe us nothing – is socially unacceptable, if not worthy of pariah status in cases where repentance is neither swift, clear nor suitably remorseful. On the other hand, there are underground criticisms, most notably those of a mystery man called Jimmy, surreptitious videos of whom are being transmitted through that most pernicious of modern curses, social media.<br /><br />Filming anyone on the sly is a low act but it’s clear that Jimmy is a legitimate and well-informed student of the game. You may not agree with everything he says – I, myself, do not – but I prefer him saying it so that at least there’s a discussion going on, so that we can get some sense of closure about what happened, why it always happens and what else can be done to stop it happening, rather than people expected to become some sort of Stepford wife-esque cheering section.<br /><br />For instance: the long and lustrous autumn of Andy Moran’s career reflects brilliantly on a man who is loved within the county and genuinely liked by nearly every other county. But how badly does it reflect on the rest of the forwards in Mayo that the county is so reliant on a man who has many more football years behind him than before him?<br /><br />The bravest thing Stephen Rochford did was play Aidan O’Shea at fullback against Kieran Donaghy, not least as it took serious guts to back an unorthodox opinion after his most famously unorthodox opinion, that it was worthwhile to drop a goalkeeper for an All-Ireland Final reply, having blown up in his face. Rochford deserves huge credit for that, and surely owns the dressing room now in a way that was less-than-obvious earlier.<br /><br />However. Rochford’s record on bringing players through is not good to the point of being bad. One of Jim Gavin’s many strengths lies in his regenerating his team without outsiders ever being able to see the joins. Rochford is now in danger of having to replace players en masse and that is a risky business. It is seldom wise not to plan ahead.<br /><br />These are just two of the challenges facing Mayo as the long quest continues into another empty winter. Up Mayo.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-88278445765352226632017-09-14T09:00:00.000+01:002017-09-14T09:00:44.665+01:00Mayo's Deliverance<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BWzYKKase_g/WbmdlWM1cUI/AAAAAAAADxI/KE3_ONw2YOEN5yLnw6nI0vDnOCOLp-08wCLcBGAs/s1600/mayo_colm_boyle_2017.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="661" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BWzYKKase_g/WbmdlWM1cUI/AAAAAAAADxI/KE3_ONw2YOEN5yLnw6nI0vDnOCOLp-08wCLcBGAs/s200/mayo_colm_boyle_2017.jpg" width="187" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div><i>Boyler takes an O'Neill's</i></div><div><i>Size 5 into custody</i></div></td></tr></tbody></table>Colm Boyle – your correspondent’s pick for the next Garda Commissioner, if Clarkie doesn’t want it – was interviewed after the defeat of Kerry in the All-Ireland semi-final. Boyle was asked how Mayo were going to prepare for the All-Ireland Final. He seemed a little puzzled by the question – “just like we always do,” was Boyle's reply.<br /><br />Some years ago, a great GAA man and friend of the blog remarked that Mayo’s best chance of winning their fourth All-Ireland was to go through a series of semi-final replays. So many replays, in fact, that they would have only one week to get ready for the final itself, and thus insulating themselves from the sort of anguish that seemed to descend on the county at these occasions.<br /><br />There was a certain logic to that at the time, but events have moved on. When Mayo appeared in their first All-Ireland Final in 38 years in 1989 the county went bananas from the thrill of it all, and stayed bananas until that great team were felled once more by that terrible hoodoo that once lived at St Jarlath’s Park, Tuam some eight months later.<br /><br />Those days are gone. There are children growing up in County Mayo currently for whom the road to Croker is as well travelled as the road to school. There is no novelty about Croker anymore. There is no novelty about winning in Croker anymore. For this iteration of the Mayo Senior Team, there really is only one last box to tick.<br /><br />It was once the case that Mayo had two choices. Either consider the All-Ireland Final the Most Important Day Of Your Life, and seize up with nerves, or else consider it just another game, and then be stunned and run over by another team for whom it was, in fact, the most important day in their lives.<br /><br />That doesn’t apply to Mayo 2017. Has there ever been a team as seasoned in the Big Time as Mayo who haven’t won an All-Ireland? Dublin are certainly a very great team, but Mayo aren’t quite chopped liver either. For this Mayo generation not to have won at least one All-Ireland already is astonishing. To think they will finish like Moses, within sight of the Promised Land but never crossing into it, is very difficult to believe.<br /><br />It is right that Dublin are favourites on Sunday of course. But while Mayo haven’t beaten Dublin in quite some time, Mayo certainly have put it up to the navy-and-sky-blue machine over the years. What will it take to make the difference?<br /><br />Dublin have two particular vulnerabilities. The first is, through no fault of their own, every game this summer has been a stroll in the park for them, with the exception of a gallant Carlow challenge. A team wiring it up to them will come as a shock, because you can’t think yourself up to a certain pitch of action. By the time you have to command your body to move up the gears to a challenge you weren't quite expecting, it may already be too late.<br /><br />The other interesting thing is that Dublin’s greatest strength is their greatest weakness. All Dublin’s church is built on the rock of the Cluxton kickout. Every brick, every wall, every buttress. If that kickout can be disrupted, will the edifice stay together or will it all come crashing down?<br /><br />Now these could all be thoughts in the air, of course. It may be that Tyrone were actually very good this year but that Dublin have evolved into a different football dimension. If so, it might get ugly for the green and red support as Dublin ascend further towards the summit of greatness and Mayo are yet again churned beneath their heels.<br /><br />And then again, maybe Tyrone just didn’t have anything in the tank, and Dublin could be the ones shouting at each other around half-past four on Sunday, wondering what’s going on as a nightmare begins to take form into material reality before them. We’ll just have to wait and see. Up Mayo.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-37178247876901222852017-08-22T09:00:00.000+01:002017-08-22T09:00:24.958+01:00Aidan O'Shea, FullbackYour correspondent is very confused by the response to Mayo playing Aidan O’Shea at fullback in the All-Ireland against Kerry on Sunday. This tweet from Matt Cooper is typical of the reaction:<br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><div dir="ltr" lang="en">Just home from Croke Park. Can only imagine what agony it must be to be a Mayo fan. But what a disaster the Aidan O'Shea experiment was.</div>— Matt Cooper (@cooper_m) <a href="https://twitter.com/cooper_m/status/899329796626427904">August 20, 2017</a></blockquote><br /><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br /><br />“Disaster” is an interesting choice of words here. Any Mayo follower worth his or salt is able to list successive disasters and rate them out of ten going back to 1925 and the All-Ireland lost in a boardroom instead of on the pitch. Where does the playing Aidan O’Shea at fullback stand in this miserable pantheon?<br /><br />Nowhere. Because it’s not like Mayo lost, is it? Mayo are still in the Championship. Mayo went into that game as 5/2 underdogs, and Matt Cooper is annoyed they didn’t beat Kerry out the gate? Extraordinary.<br /><br />Malachy Clerkin of the <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/gaelic-games/gaelic-football/fool-s-errand-aidan-o-shea-out-of-his-depth-in-defence-1.3192519">Irish Times</a> reckons 2-6 of Kerry’s 2-14 can be attributed to Donaghy. Maybe so, maybe not. It is, however, a fact that one single point is all Donaghy scored from play. Donaghy scored two goals in the All-Ireland Final of 2007 as Kerry whipped Cork 3-13 to 1-9, but the Cork fullback on that day went on to win an All-Star at fullback that same year.<br /><br />So having Donaghy score two goals on you in the All-Ireland Final doesn’t cost you an All-Star but having him score one point on you is the reason Mayo didn’t beat Kerry on Sunday? Clear as mud, my Lord.<br /><br />One of the reasons put forward for Mayo’s playing of Aidan O’Shea being a “disaster” is his incalculable loss out the field. And this doesn’t quite add up either.<br /><br />Reader, how many previews of Sunday’s game hinged on Kerry’s terror at the havoc Aidan O’Shea was going to cause in among the Kerry backs? Contrast that not-very-high number with the number of times you’ve read about Mayo’s lack of forward quality.<br /><br />It would seem that in the space of seventy minutes Mayo have gone from lacking a quality forward to having the damn things falling out of the trees – Andy Moran, Cillian O’Connor – the current top scorer in the Championship with 3-52 and counting, by the way – and now Aidan O’Shea, Destroyer of Worlds.<br /><br />Remember all that stuff you read during the year about Aidan O’Shea being distracted by being on that Toughest Trade TV show, or playing basketball, or having selfies taken with children, or not looking up, or running with his head down and not letting it in? All in your imagination. Nobody ever thought, wrote or podcasted any such thing at all at all. In actual fact, the very sun itself rises from Aidan O’Shea’s not-at-all-fat-perfectly-athletic-in-fact bottom.<br /><br />Are there questions that could be asked of the Mayo management? You betcha there are questions, but not one of them has anything to do with Aidan O’Shea playing fullback on Sunday. Not one. The very worst you could say about it is that the case is not proven, and if there are problems in the way Mayo set up it’ll take more than a straight swap between Aidan O’Shea and Donie Vaughan to solve them. Up Mayo.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-35100012955188789192017-06-26T09:00:00.000+01:002017-06-26T09:00:08.887+01:00The Ballad of Diarmuid Connolly<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fZh4xpb5HJ0/WVAdcqfUG7I/AAAAAAAADw0/n3iEz_Q-lRoeIaEyT2kb7DJVw7qEokBYACLcBGAs/s1600/dublin_diarmuid_connolly_2017_linesman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="620" height="176" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fZh4xpb5HJ0/WVAdcqfUG7I/AAAAAAAADw0/n3iEz_Q-lRoeIaEyT2kb7DJVw7qEokBYACLcBGAs/s320/dublin_diarmuid_connolly_2017_linesman.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><i>Jim Gavin Lambastes Pat Spillane and 'The Sunday Game.'</i> <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/gaelic-games/gaelic-football/jim-gavin-lambastes-pat-spillane-and-the-sunday-game-1.3133166">Irish Times</a>, June 25th, 2017.<br /><br /><b>The Ballad of Diarmuid Connolly</b><br /><b><br /></b>A great crowd had gathered, in Mercs and Land Rovers<br />The lawyers of Dublin would soon earn their fee<br />For inside in Central Council, a brave son of Dublin<br />Was tried for his summer before the C-C-C-C<br /><br />Our gentle young Diarmuid, who plays hurling and football<br />Stood proud in the dock like a true Dublin man<br />While before him in judgement sat a big gang of culchies<br />Their minds already poisoned by Patrick Spillane<br /><br />The legals and the eagles could do nothing for Dermo<br />Neither Clucko nor Fento nor the rest of our Champs<br />Now Dermot has nothing to do for the summer<br />But hang sponsored boots off the Five Lamps<br /><br />God’s curse on you culchies, you cruel-hearted monsters,<br />Look what you’ve done to our football scene – oh!<br />But we’re not defeated, we’ll beat you in winter<br />Because our real hero is J Mourinho.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-13867956740763888842017-06-08T09:00:00.000+01:002017-06-08T09:00:10.253+01:00Mayo v Galway: The Lonesome Road to Salthill<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dzwR2qo1bCg/WThcPKt3LhI/AAAAAAAADwg/bHHqm9WLrYcCZU9jT3iREt1LBkqwxhqaQCLcB/s1600/mayo_aidan_oshea_galway_gareth_bradshaw.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="549" height="199" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dzwR2qo1bCg/WThcPKt3LhI/AAAAAAAADwg/bHHqm9WLrYcCZU9jT3iREt1LBkqwxhqaQCLcB/s320/mayo_aidan_oshea_galway_gareth_bradshaw.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><i><br /></i><i>Like one that on a lonesome road<br />Doth walk in fear and dread,<br />And having once turn'd round, walks on,<br />And turns no more his head;<br />Because he knows a frightful fiend<br />Doth close behind him tread.</i><br /><i><br /></i>The Mayo fan has no fear of frightful fiends. Why would he or she? What chills the Mayo soul in the lead-up to Mayo’s trip to face Galway in Salthill are entirely more rational and comprehensible than the slimy things in the slimy sea that so bothered the <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/101/549.html">Ancient Mariner</a>.<br /><br />Billy Joe Padden, in a typically excellent preview of events in the <a href="http://www.mayonews.ie/sports/30147-galway-mayo-game-is-going-to-be-close">Mayo News</a>, outlined how Mayo can beat Galway. Billy would like to see a sweeper, ideally Kevin McLoughlin; he’d like Aidan O’Shea to start, ideally somewhere in the middle of the field; he’d like Andy Moran to finish the game, rather than start it, meaning Andy must come on as a sub, and above all Billy would like to see Mayo attack in numbers from the middle third.<br /><br />Your correspondent sees the merit in every one of these arguments. My own personal contribution to Mayo’s Heroic Path to Immortality would be to play Aidan O’Shea at full-forward, rather than in midfield, but it’s not something I’d fall out with people over, least of all someone who knows so much more about these things than me, as Billy Joe does.<br /><br />However. What does make me wonder just whether or not a frightful fiend doth close behind me tread is that we have seen no evidence at all of Mayo playing in the way Billy suggests all year, and there’s no reason to expect them to change their ways now.<br /><br />There is a growing trend in GAA discussion that suggests anyone outside the team and its back-room team – henceforth referred to as “The Group” – has no business questioning any decisions made by The Group. Such questioning is, in fact, as near to treason as makes no difference.<br /><br />Your correspondent takes an opposite view. Your correspondent thinks that the Mayo edifice – players, trainers, even the Board – have a duty to keep the fans reasonably informed of what’s going on with the county team. That does not seem unreasonable. It’s so reasonable, in fact, that Darragh Ó Sé made a case for it in yesterday’s <a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/sport/gaelic-games/darragh-%C3%B3-s%C3%A9-cork-must-beat-tipperary-or-they-will-go-under-1.3109868">Irish Times</a>:<br /><br /><i>Supporters need to be led. They need to be given something to believe in. They need big players and big personalities showing them the way. Not giving them a reason to shrug their shoulders and decide that this is just how things are.</i><br /><i><br /></i>Where are the Mayo supporters being led right now? Your correspondent is more than eager to hear something, anything, from The Group in response to the following questions that have been rattling around my noggin:<br /><ul><li>Why has Kevin McLoughlin spent the entire league at corner-forward if he’s going to play sweeper in the Championship?</li><li>If McLoughin isn’t going to play sweeper, who is? Will Mayo play with a sweeper at all? And if not, why not?</li><li>Why start Andy Moran when you need him most in the final twenty minutes?</li><li>Why didn’t Robbie Hennelly start one home game in League? We all know David Clarke is the Number One choice but Robbie is still No 2 to a keeper who isn’t getting any younger and who has a history of knocks. Hennelly is going to catch Hell from the fans whenever he starts, so why not start him in the bleak midwinter and get it over with.</li></ul>These aren’t the only questions that need asking, but they’ll do for now. If they’re not being asked aloud, people are certainly thinking them – by the time these things dawn on your correspondent they will have long ago dawned on better football people. And, like anything that’s supressed, the reaction will be greater the longer it has to stay underground.<br /><br />If, God forbid, Galway should win in Salthill you can expect these questions to come bursting forth. You may say that’s unfair, but fair has nothing to do with it. The price of playing at the great height at which Mayo have played for the past six or seven years is that the fall is steeper.<br /><br />And there is the awful truth that, for all the long and wonderful summers, Sam did not come home. Sam’s not coming home is more than a detail; Sam’s not coming home is why the depths of Mayo’s fear and trembling are so much greater than Galway because, even though Sam hasn’t been in Galway for sixteen years, that’s as the snapping of the fingers compared to sixty-six years, and counting.<br /><br />Kildare never really came close to Galway in the Division 2 Final, but Kildare, with all due respect to them, weren’t really that great. Equally, Galway laid an egg the size of the Rock of Gibraltar in losing to Tipperary, something for which they did not get anywhere like the roasting a Mayo team would have got. Of if they did, they kept it quiet.<br /><br />A seasoned Mayo team on the top of its game has nothing to fear from Galway. But a malfunctioning Mayo team, whose identity is slipping away for whatever reasons, will always walk in fear and dread. Let’s hope that walk to nowhere doesn’t start on Sunday. Up Mayo.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-49636873734641486862017-05-29T09:00:00.000+01:002017-05-29T09:00:03.944+01:00The Football Championship - A Pageant, Not a Product<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-28o1nSQ8JvM/WSsNcDkT9II/AAAAAAAADwM/ZOeb0gy4RVMAXfDd5n4hg2gfJy4F6SaSwCLcB/s1600/dublin-philly-mcmahon-sam-maguire.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="620" height="176" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-28o1nSQ8JvM/WSsNcDkT9II/AAAAAAAADwM/ZOeb0gy4RVMAXfDd5n4hg2gfJy4F6SaSwCLcB/s320/dublin-philly-mcmahon-sam-maguire.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Championship: Philly seems to like it.</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Positing the notion that a two-tier Championship is inevitable in <a href="http://tuairisc.ie/ni-faic-dioscursa-an-eadochais-faoi-cheist-na-gaeilge-i-gcomortas-le-siorghioscan-lucht-peile/">Tuairisc</a> earlier this month, the great Dara Ó Cinnéide wondered in passing how anyone could have the idea that the Championship could ever be a level playing field, with county demographics and traditions being what they are.<br /><br />In light of this, it’s interesting to remember just why the back-door system was introduced in the first place. The original idea was that many teams were denied either the Championship itself or a good long summer run by the vagaries of chance, with the Cork footballers of the 1970s being the most frequently cited example. Had they not had the ill-luck to share Munster at the same time as the Kerry Golden Years team, who knows what could have happened?<br /><br />And that’s why the back-door was introduced. Not to level the playing field for all, but in the hope that no more should a flower like that Cork team be born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air, as Mr Gray might have put it.<br /><br />The back-door is with us sixteen years now, and the Law of Unintended Consequences has kicked in. The back-door Championship was introduced at a time that the economy was booming and the enforcement of the GAA’s amateur ethos grew increasingly token. So an initially-flawed idea – Cork were going to have face Kerry at some stage, after all – mutated into an even worse one and left us the mess we have today, where the GAA is having an existential crisis without properly realising it.<br /><br />The whinging about the format of the Championship that (correctly) bothers Ó Cinnéide is based on the idea that the Championship is a sports entertainment product competing in a marketplace with other sports entertainment products like European Cup Rugby and the English Premier League. But it’s not. It’s something completely, uniquely different to that.<br /><br />The things that make the Championship great cannot exist as part of a sports entertainment product. The Championship is written about as if the GAA exists to present a sports entertainment product. That is not why the GAA exists. The GAA exists to allow as many people as is practicable to play Gaelic Games as often as they wish. The inter-county Championship is a by-product of those thousands and thousands of games. The Championship is accident; the club games are essence.<br /><br />This fundamental point is being lost in the hubbub as the GAA striates further between the haves and have-nots, and the separation will get even worse when the Super Eight series are introduced next year. The people running the GAA think the increased revenue will improve the Association. It will not. The increased money will destroy the Association by creating a professional division that will leave the ordinary club players behind. The ordinary club players and members who, after all, comprise the vast majority of the membership of the Association in the first place.<br /><br />Under pressure of money, propaganda and carelessness the GAA is inching along a road where the needs of elite athletes will be prioritised over the needs of the thousands and thousands of fat bucks, slow bucks, clumsy bucks and hungover bucks who need and deserve the regular games that the GAA can provide them. The prioritisation should be the reverse.<br /><br />Ewan McKenna, a man never afraid to speak truth to power, tweeted this after Tyrone walloped Derry yesterday:<br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><div dir="ltr" lang="en">Please, please, please GAA, bring in two-tier championship. After so much brilliant competitive sport yesterday, I can't watch this mismatch</div>— Ewan MacKenna (@EwanMacKenna) <a href="https://twitter.com/EwanMacKenna/status/868821273236910081">May 28, 2017</a></blockquote><br /><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />But McKenna misses the point. The GAA isn’t about providing yet another dish to the armchair fan’s sporting feast. The moment its raison d’etre becomes the production of a sports entertainment product it’s all over for the Association.<br /><br />McKenna will have his two-tiered Championship then. There may be two or three Dublin teams, two or three Ulster, two Connacht, two Munster, two Leinster. They won’t be counties though – they’ll be Lions, or Kestrels, or Wolfhounds instead.<br /><br />There will be transfers and big money signings. The media will get proper media access, where players will dutifully remark that today’s performance was no surprise as everybody in the unit knew that if they executed their process everything would come right on the day. Hurling will go the way of having grammatical Irish in programmes – a fond yet distant memory.<br /><br />Is the situation doomed, then? Is there anything that can be done?<br /><br />Happily, the cause is not yet lost and there is something that can be done. Three things, in fact.<br /><br />Firstly, close the back door. The Championship is a knockout competition like Wimbledon or World Championship Snooker. If you lose, you lose. Get over it.<br /><br />Secondly, the GAA needs to remember it’s an amateur organisation, and that means bread-and-water diets for those who’ve been spending like sailors on shore leave. Either a budget cap or, better again, revenue-sharing as in the NFL of the United States. No more lawyering up to escape bans and most of all, proper and painful sanctions for those who would flout these laws.<br /><br />Finally, it’s perfectly possible to accommodate those who want a more equal inter-county playing field by reconfiguring the League. Three divisions, home and away, promotion and relegation of course, maybe playoffs for the crack. The better players in each county get to test themselves against teams of the same level. The great <a href="http://www.irishexaminer.com/sport/columnists/kieran-shannon/kieran-shannon-league-must-get-shot-in-the-arm-356516.html">Kieran Shannon of the Examiner</a> has made the point many times that reworking the League will do more to address the uneven playing inter-county playing field than a hundred tweaks to the Championship.<br /><br />The League can be run off between January and June, and then July-August-September are free for the pageantry of the Championship. Sports scientists and protein-shake aficionados will know that the best team is the one that does best in the League, while the Championship retains its ancient glory and stays true to the notion that a commoner may challenge a king, and that one crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-1619269972635554412017-05-25T09:00:00.000+01:002017-05-25T09:00:19.404+01:00Seán Fitzpatrick Trial Collapses - Irish Media Lets the Nation Down<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ky5qBgzV90U/WSYLDsqHGEI/AAAAAAAADv4/Nz75kYgVbpEyG-Som4Y0NeyQst7MR7g3ACLcB/s1600/anglo_irish_bank.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="180" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ky5qBgzV90U/WSYLDsqHGEI/AAAAAAAADv4/Nz75kYgVbpEyG-Som4Y0NeyQst7MR7g3ACLcB/s320/anglo_irish_bank.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div>To an institution, the Irish media made the wrong call yesterday. Everybody – Morning Ireland, all the papers, Newstalk and the rest – saw the Manchester bombing as the most important story of the day. It wasn’t. Not in Ireland.</div><div><br /></div><div>The collapse of the Seán Fitzpatrick trial was the more important story from an Irish perspective, and the across-the-board failure to cover that properly is another erosion of the public’s faith in the institutions of the state – an erosion that can lead to the washing away of the state entirely if it’s not addressed.</div><div><br /></div><div>Seán Fitzpatrick was the face of the Irish Economic Crash. He was chairman of Anglo-Irish Bank, the bank that lead the field in terms of funny business, and which had over-extended itself to such a degree that the Government felt it had no option but to guarantee all debts of all Irish banks in 2008.</div><div><br /></div><div>For the past ten years, the feeling has existed that the crash was due to reckless banking practices and it seemed right and just that certain reckless bankers should pay for that. But the collapse of the Seán Fitzpatrick trial suggests that’s really not going to happen.</div><div><br /></div><div>The reasons why the trial collapsed or whether or not the law that deals with white collar crime is fit for purpose are questions for another day. What I’m concerned with this is the media’s inability to realise the importance of this story concerning Seán Fitzpatrick and the collapse of his trial.</div><div><br /></div><div>In trying to come to terms with how someone so very unsuited to the job is currently President of the United States of America in Monday’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/opinion/alienated-mind-trump-supporters.html?src=me">New York Times</a>, David Brooks had some fascinating things to say about the phenomenon of alienation. It was, after all, the alienated who voted for Trump – those traditional Democratic voters in Wisconsin whom Hillary Clinton could not be bothered canvassing, for instance.</div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Angry voters made a few things abundantly clear: that modern democratic capitalism is not working for them; that basic institutions like the family and communities are falling apart; that we have a college educated elite that has found ingenious ways to make everybody else feel invisible, that has managed to transfer wealth upward to itself, that crashes the hammer of political correctness down on anybody who does not have faculty lounge views.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Does that sound at all familiar?</div><div><br /></div><div>Fianna Fáil suffered the most catastrophic election result in its history in 2011 as a result of the electorate’s anger at the crash and, despite a recovery in 2016, the party is still struggling to regain lost ground. The electorate, meanwhile, disenfranchised with the last government because of a Labour betrayal and a tone-deaf Fine Gael slogan, remains in hostile mood as it still struggles to understand if democracy works in this country.</div><div><br /></div><div>That’s what makes the Seán Fitzpatrick trial so important. The nation was going to come to terms with what happened through that trial. The nation would have become more educated in how banks and the state interact, the system would be able to strengthen its regulatory powers, all sorts of good and healing things would happen.</div><div><br /></div><div>Not only will those things not now happen, the establishment of the state – and remember always that the media is the Fourth Estate of the Establishment – doesn’t even seem to register the nature of the crisis.</div><div><br /></div><div>People are quivering with anger over the collapse of the Seán Fitzpatrick trial. They turned on Morning Ireland yesterday morning to hear about it and all they heard about was Manchester. The papers were all Manchester, and&nbsp;that’s how it continued throughout the day.</div><div><br /></div><div>Micheál Martin told the Dáil yesterday that the collapse of the trial was a damning indictment of the Office of Director of Corporate Enforcement, and the Taoiseach agreed with him. But what does that mean, really? What is the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement? Where is it? Who’s in charge of it? To whom does it answer?</div><div><br /></div><div>We don’t know. The Office seems just another quango, that just exists for the sake of existing, without ever doing anything. The nearest we came to finding out what exactly the ODCE does was from RTÉ’s Orla O’Donnell’s <a href="https://www.rte.ie/news/special-reports/2017/0523/877305-sean-fitzpatrick/">frankly terrifying account</a> of why the trial collapsed which gained no media traction, not even in the “National Broadcaster” itself.</div><div><br /></div><div>If your correspondent were in charge, Ms O’Donnell’s story would the front page story on my newspaper, the first story on my radio show. Instead; silence and the shrugging of shoulders.</div><div><br /></div><div>The media are enjoying the soap opera of the <a href="http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/shane-coleman/fine-gael-spoilt-for-choice-but-a-spiteful-contest-will-turn-electorate-off-and-leave-the-party-divided-35749315.html">Fine Gael leadership race</a> or else hand-wringing about when we’ll have a <a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/una-mullally-fine-gael-rules-unchallenged-as-cowed-labour-stays-mute-1.3090965">Labour Party progressives can believe in</a>. In the meantime, the poor sods who get up and go to work and pay tax and send the kids to school and hope they’ll have some future look at all this and wonder: what’s going on, and why doesn’t someone do something about it?</div><div><br /></div><div>In their alienation, the citizens of the US took a chance on Trump. In whom will the Irish place their trust when the time comes?</div>An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-52823680136624779052017-05-17T09:00:00.000+01:002017-05-17T09:00:13.660+01:00Mayo Championship Preview 2017<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-T8KDl_Pg2Os/WRoHsZtycuI/AAAAAAAADvk/h_PFHKLH6WsOwViTy-vLo4DLT8FMBGUHQCLcB/s1600/mayo_evan_regan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-T8KDl_Pg2Os/WRoHsZtycuI/AAAAAAAADvk/h_PFHKLH6WsOwViTy-vLo4DLT8FMBGUHQCLcB/s320/mayo_evan_regan.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>One of the perpetual debates that take place where two or more Mayo football folk gather is the one that looks back at the different teams that reached the All-Ireland Final in recent years, and wonders if that particular team let one slip away or if they were blessed to get there in the first place.<br /><br />1996, above any, is seen as one that slipped away while 2004 vies with 2006 as years where Mayo were lucky to get as far as they got is the general feeling in the county.<br /><br />Your correspondent, however, is nothing if not a difficult man and would argue that the 2004 and 2006 teams are under-rated, and it is the fact of their failing so badly on the big day that causes them to be judged more harshly than they deserved.<br /><br />For instance, the 2004 campaign started in Castlebar with Galway going 1-3 to 0-0 up in the first ten minutes, and friends of your correspondent at the game contemplated turning to Buddhism, leaving all possessions behind and wandering the world with a begging bowl, anything but to have to watch any more of this.<br /><br />But Mayo came back, helped in no small part by the arrival of David Brady from the subs’ bench, and later that summer put the All-Ireland Champions, Tyrone to the sword, again inspired by David Brady. You may cavil that Tyrone were still mourning their fallen hero, the great Cormac McAnallan, and of course that’s possible. But equally we’ve heard narratives going the other way too, that after a tragedy there was no way such-and-such a team were to be denied. Again, it’s one of these things that is only knowable in hindsight, and never at the time.<br /><br />All of which is a long way of coming around to ask the critical contemporary question: did Mayo deserve their place in the All-Ireland Final last year, or where they lucky to get there?<br /><br />Last year’s final was the reverse of the usual Mayo paradigm where Mayo play beautifully during the Championship and then blow up like the volcanic island of Krakatoa in the final. Mayo played like a drain all through last summer, only to rip off the disguise and give Dublin the fright of their lives in the Final. There was one Mayo supporter who could feel the hot tears of pride welling in his eyes looking Mayo’s defiance against Dublin. I know, because I was that Mayo supporter.<br /><br />And then they lost, again, and then came this year’s League.<br /><br />This year’s League wasn’t great. Armagh’s Oisin McConville was fairly withering in his assessment of Mayo on the <a href="http://www.secondcaptains.com/">Second Captains</a> podcast after Dublin disembowelled Mayo on a Saturday night in March, and it was hard to argue cogently against any of the points he made. Where have Mayo got better? Why should we believe that Mayo are ready to that extra yard that has eluded them for so long?<br /><br />The return of Galway to football’s top table casts a considerable shadow over the Mayo summer. Hopefully the team’s mind is focussed solely on Sligo, whom Mayo face this coming Sunday, but every supporter is thinking of that journey into the claustrophobic confines of Pearse Stadium, Salthill, three weeks later.<br /><br />This isn’t the first time Mayo have gone to Salthill nervous after a poor League. James Horan’s second year in charge was such a time, when Mayo responded by buttering Galway up and down the seaside. But that was then and this is now. Mayo were young and hungry then; they’re not that anymore.<br /><br />Mayo’s visit to the back-door last year was their best-ever campaign in the wilderness, but the difference between the front and back-door Championships for a team with Mayo’s miles on the clock can’t be underestimated.<br /><br />In the front door, Mayo’s experience stands to them. Everyone they play knows who they are, has been watching them on TV for the past six years. There’s nothing the opposition can do that Mayo haven’t seen and aren’t ready for. If Mayo play a team with less experience, that’s what the young team will see.<br /><br />But if Mayo play a team with less experience in the Qualifiers, what are the young lads thinking? It depends on who knocked the other team out. If they lost to a Division 4 team and half the panel are already in the States, they’re cooked.<br /><br />However; if they’re Kildare, say, and they lost to Dublin, what have they got to lose? Dublin were always going to win but win just two more games are they’re back in Croker in high summer, exactly where they want to be! Isn’t that what we want boys? Isn’t that what all those long winter nights were about? Now come on and put these losers out of their misery!<br /><br />Or whatever. Getting to Croker is a big deal for the up-and-coming team in a way it can’t be for a veteran team like Mayo. To be still playing football in August is an achievement for nearly every team in Ireland. It doesn’t mean diddly in Mayo. Sam or the Void for Mayo. There is no in between, and that’s a hard mark to make.<br /><br />You may say that the Qualifiers did Mayo no harm last but there’s one more year’s mileage on the clock and fellas have to be wondering. Some of the selections and tactics have left supporters scratching their heads. If the team are scratching their heads too, Mayo are not long for the summer.<br /><br />The Championship is about momentum. If Mayo beat Galway in Salthill, Mayo have some momentum.&nbsp; They will still have to find an identity, but the League form will be on the summer breeze and another golden road opens up before them.<br /><br />If Mayo lose or, worse, get hammered in Salthill, their momentum is zero and any young team with ambition will see them only as prey when Mayo are taken out of the pot. So; another light-hearted and carefree Championship in store for the sweet county Mayo, the finest county in Ireland.<br />An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-24068220700200252632017-05-16T09:00:00.000+01:002017-05-16T09:00:20.777+01:002017 Football Championship Preview<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HaSQumm9FJc/WRoBQYLAUjI/AAAAAAAADvU/lUOpAdLhEXMm6J5xa-bcxlj54fIeWOa1QCEw/s1600/dublin_stephen_cluxton_sam_2016.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="170" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HaSQumm9FJc/WRoBQYLAUjI/AAAAAAAADvU/lUOpAdLhEXMm6J5xa-bcxlj54fIeWOa1QCEw/s320/dublin_stephen_cluxton_sam_2016.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>To consider this year’s football Championship is to long for the open competition of the Big Four era four or five years ago. The truth of the 2017 Championship is that there is Dublin, and there is the rest.<br /><br />The Champions reign far above anybody else in the firmament and no circumstance can be imagined in which any path to glory can bypass them.<br /><br />Kerry’s recent win over Dublin in the National League Final suggests that Dublin’s great historical rival may be on the way back, but being on the way and having arrived are two different things.<br /><br />Kerry are the aristocrats of football – how could they not be? – and that made the artisanal nature of their game against Dublin so strange. One does not expect to see royalty with the shirt off, down in a hole, digging, but that’s exactly what Kerry did to do something, anything, to keep up with Dublin.<br /><br />And more luck to them. Kerry people love to talk about beautiful football but that’s just blather for the tourists on the jaunting cars around Killarney. Kerry know that the only beauty is in winning, and whether that winning is done with the rapier or the broadsword is very much a secondary detail.<br /><br />If Kerry and Dublin win Munster and Leinster – and goodness, what a shock it would be if they didn’t – they are not due to meet until the final and such a final would be a game everybody in the country could look forward to. But the chances of Kerry putting another one over on Dublin are slim.<br /><br />A rare sight in contemporary football was to be seen in the League Final as Dublin’s Cian O’Sullivan, emperor of the Dublin defence, was utterly unable to figure out just what was going on. Kerry had found a way to get past him and for once O’Sullivan had little impact on a game. But what will Kerry do the next time, now O’Sullivan and Dublin are forewarned?<br /><br />Jim Gavin gets insufficient credit for his tactical nous – Dublin have so many players the idea exists that all a manager has to do is roll them a ball and let them get on with it. But Gavin proved his worth in the All-Ireland replay. Gavin made three tactical changes for the replay, all of which worked. His opposite number made only one, and that blew up in Stephen Rochford’s face. Game, set and match, Gavin.<br /><br />While Kerry are not in Dublin’s league, is anyone else in Kerry’s? It’s a hard case to make. For a time, it looked like Mickey Harte was about to do what only Seán Boylan has done, and build All-Ireland teams from two different generations. Tyrone faced Kerry in the 2015 semi-final and it is a fact that the Kerrymen were scared of a Tyrone returned to their opening-years-of-the-century glory – you could sense the fear in the players before the game, and the sheer relief afterwards among the Kerry support.<br /><br />But the new model Tyrone lack the score-taking ability of their forebears and you can’t win games of Gaelic football if you can’t take your scores.<br /><br />Donegal are still a threat, but that threat is lessening. There are hints of trouble in the camp and, while Michael Murphy is the best pound-for-pound footballer in Ireland, we are reminded of the remarks of Doctor Henry “Indiana” Jones, Junior, to Marian Ravenwood in their desperate flight from Egypt aboard the good ship Batu Wind – it ain’t the years, honey, it’s the mileage.<br /><br />Galway were impressive in their win over Kildare in the National League Division 2 Final. They have forwards with that little bit of cut about them, and the day when Galway were too posh to press in defence are long gone. It’s been a long, long time since anyone outside the top flight won the All-Ireland however, and it’s hard to see Galway doing it this year for that reason. Seasoning counts in modern football.<br /><br />For those who enjoy a longshot bet, I would consider Monaghan at 40/1. Galway are a shorter price even though Monaghan are now veterans of Division 1 and Galway haven’t played in the top league in years – this is the benefit of being glamorous, which Monaghan never have been. But if Sam is to go further than Dublin – and it’d be a really big surprise if he does – Monaghan at 40/1 looks the value bet to me.<br /><br />Mayo? Tomorrow, friends, tomorrow. What’s one more day in a sixty-six year wait?An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-30606773801029560672017-04-18T09:00:00.000+01:002017-04-18T09:00:28.959+01:00Education Policy and Teacher Conferences<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9yOhxwlMVgw/WPUeb3e2BKI/AAAAAAAADvA/umIkb_cMXmk4hsY_VyVozvTw3bvxxVL7QCLcB/s1600/doctor_who_school_reunion.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="183" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9yOhxwlMVgw/WPUeb3e2BKI/AAAAAAAADvA/umIkb_cMXmk4hsY_VyVozvTw3bvxxVL7QCLcB/s320/doctor_who_school_reunion.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">An intelligent child participating in class, yesterday.</td></tr></tbody></table><br />The second week of the Easter Holidays is conference season for the three main teachers’ unions. This year, the INTO meets in Belfast, the TUI assemble in Cork and the ASTI meet in Killarney of the lakes.<br /><br />Your faithful correspondent’s crystal ball can predict the coverage of the difference conferences right now and save everybody a lot of gas. The biggest single topic will be money, of course. There will be stories about school divestment, all focusing on the urgency of the thing and none trying to figure out how two sides who want something to happen can’t make something happen.<br /><br />And there will be earnest thought pieces about the need for greater emphasis on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects in both secondary and primary schools. STEM advocacy is so popular now that it wouldn’t surprise your correspondent if the only thing stopping some advocate form suggesting STEM subjects be taught in the womb is the fear of raising a hare in the matter of the Eighth Amendment, and we’ll get plenty of that in days to come, thank you very much.<br /><br />All of these motions will be discussed by mostly earnest people who have an interest in their profession and are trying to make it better. But there is an elephant in the room that is seldom discussed, and that was only drawn to your correspondent’s attention over the weekend.<br /><br />While browsing in the top floor of Hodges Figgis bookstore on Dublin’s Dawson Street, your faithful quillsman got talking to a maths teacher, who was in there because, he told me, he likes to stay on his game and ensure he has fresh questions with which to challenge his students.<br /><br />We got talking about maths in general, and the nature of the subject. I half-expected a jeremiad against Project Maths, a recent initiative of the Department that is roundly despised by any maths teachers of my own acquaintance, but no. This man told me that the single biggest problem that he sees in his classes is that the poor standard of verbal reasoning among the children means that some of them struggle to understand the question itself, to say nothing of being able to answer the thing.<br /><br />Stephen Leacock wrote a much-loved essay called <a href="http://www.online-literature.com/stephen-leacock/literary-lapses/40/">A, B, and C: The Human Element in Mathematics</a>, in which he speculated about the real lives of those mysterious characters who appear in maths questions – A can dig a hole at twice the speed of B, who himself digs holes at half the speed of C. If C digs three holes an hour, how long does it take A to dig five holes?<br /><br />A glance at current <a href="http://theleavingcert.com/exam-papers/mathematics/">Leaving Cert papers</a> suggests that these sorts of problems are all over the shop, as part of making maths more “relevant.” But what it’s actually doing is making maths harder, because the child doesn’t have the skills to read the question. It seems nobody was paying attention to that one.<br /><br />It’s very hard to get to the truth of these things. Teachers can feel a little paranoid about people always having a go at them, and journalists find divestment so much more box-office than dull educational theorizing. But if this anecdotal evidence is generally reflective of the current state of affairs, this is a time bomb that can fracture the state even further when it blows.<br /><br />It seems the notion of the homework-less school is more and more in fashion at the present time. And that’s fine, for those who realise that, while one agrees with it at supper in Sandymount, one has been reading to Meadhbh and Conchobar since they were toddlers and making damn sure they were literate before they even got to school.<br /><br />But what about the kids whose parents don’t read, and aren’t literary, or well-educated, or even educated at all? The State education system is meant to provide a safety net for them, so that they are given the one and only shot at escaping a poverty trap – education. But the State is failing badly in this remit and politicians who claim to represent the disadvantaged and marginalized in society are too busy making jackasses of themselves time and time again over water charges and other nonsense rather than trying to do something, anything, useful for once in their careers.<br /><br />Class doesn’t matter. This isn’t the 19th century anymore. Education is what separates haves and have-nots now, and it is legitimate to wonder who is shouting for the have-nots when it comes to education. Not one damn person from what I can see.<br /><br />Enjoy the teachers’ conferences. I am not looking forward to the 1,500 word think-piece in tomorrow’s Irish Times drawing a shrewd parallel between the divestment delay and the Tuam babies cover-up, but I am grateful that I would be able to read it if I wanted to. There isn’t a day that goes by that I’m not grateful for that ability, and my heart breaks for those who will never get the opportunity to learn as I learned. God help them.<br /><br />FOCAL SCOIR: One hour and forty minutes, of course.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028073.post-77151336751998180142017-02-27T09:00:00.000+00:002017-02-27T09:00:27.381+00:00Irish Politics Summed Up in Seventy-Seven Words<blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>"The hospital was proposed in 2002/2003. One of my daughters was going into secondary school at the time. At the same time, there was a hospital proposed in Perth. That daughter of mine went through secondary school, went through medical school, went through internship and, two years ago, went out to Perth to work in the hospital. By the time she was working in the hospital, not a block had yet been laid for the Irish hospital."</i></blockquote><br /><br />Gerald Flynn, speaking about the projected cost overrun for the National Children's Hospital on <a href="http://www.rte.ie/radio1/the-late-debate/">RTÉ Radio One's Late Debate</a> last Thursday, February 23, 2017.An Spailpínhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13156692732154093747noreply@blogger.com